Solving the world’s food crisis has no simple answers, but it’s clear that innovation is needed to even begin addressing the problem.
A big hurdle in farming, however, is that an innovation that works well in one area may fail in another due to different soils, microclimate conditions, and other factors. Context is key — making it challenging to replicate successes. One answer may lie in artificial intelligence, which offers a way to pool disparate sources of information and data to give more comprehensive, location-specific advice on improving agricultural methods.
Digital Green, which became an independent nonprofit when it was spun off from Microsoft Research 15 years ago, has been developing new tools with that issue in mind.