X – The Moonshot Factory is an American top-secret research group that aims to solve big-picture ideas through technological breakthroughs that could one day make the world a better place.
For its latest project, called Mineral, the team turned its attention towards sustainable farming. Its main goal is to master advanced hardware and software to enable growers to raise more diverse and healthier crops, using a custom-built plant-inspecting buggy set to do all the challenging work.
Most farmlands are dedicated to growing a small number of crop types, including wheat, rice, and maize. However, low crop diversities make farming more vulnerable to climate change, disease, and pests and degrade the soil’s quality and microbiome diversity.
To remedy this issue, the Mineral team uses computational agriculture, in which cutting-edge hardware, software, and sensors enable farmers to understand the genetic diversity of the 30K edible plant species worldwide. Understanding the plant species and how they manage could help farmers identify and grow more resilient crops in specific environments while having less reliance on water, chemicals, and fertilizers. Better soil data sits at the center of that goal: a new soil phosphorus test can now measure a nutrient pool that standard methods miss.
The team began by collecting information on historical crop data, soil, and weather in different regions. Then, they built an electric plant-inspecting buggy prototype to monitor how crops are growing in these environments, putting it to use in soybean crop grounds in Illinois and strawberry fields in California.
The buggy first uses GPS to pinpoint each plant’s exact location, then sensors and cameras gather data on their health. This system has allowed the buggy to observe crops such as lettuce, melons, barley, and oats while providing valuable insight like fruit and leaf size, bean counts, and plant height.
When this information on plant condition and health is mixed with data on soil, weather, and satellite imagery, it identifies patterns via machine learning and offers insight into how the plants grow in that particular environment. The Mineral team hopes that this ability to monitor individual plant health can help farmers better understand the crops, predict crop yields more efficiently, and increase their fields’ overall production.
Elliott Grant, who leads X’s Mineral project, said:
“Just as the microscope led to a transformation in how diseases are detected and managed, we hope that better tools will enable the agriculture industry to transform how food is grown.”
In January 2010, X—The Moonshot Factory was founded by Google, and now it operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. A decade in, X—The Moonshot Factory has hatched hundreds of different projects, many of which have gone on to become successful independent businesses.
