<div id="readability-page-1"><div>Founder and CEO at InnerPlant, making living sensors to help farmers become more profitable and more sustainable. 
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Picture a farm, and what do you see? For most of us who grew up singing “Old McDonald,” the image that springs to mind is quaint and pastoral: a smallholding with red-painted barns, a few chickens or grazing cows and folks in dungarees forking hay. In reality, though, modern farms are huge enterprises spanning many thousands of acres, where you’re more likely to run into robotic harvesters and self-driving tractors than into a human farmworker.  
The rise of AI-powered machinery allows farmers to achieve incredible things and to produce the vast amounts of low-cost, high-quality food needed to support our booming population. But we’ve lost something along the way. The more we automate our farms, the easier it is to forget that agriculture is ultimately about growing plants, not programming robots and maintaining automated machinery.  
 
Plants Make Better Sensors 
Biological innovations created modern farming. Without genetically advanced seeds and soil applications, for instance, we’d be unable to feed ourselves. But today, most agricultural R&amp;D focuses on silicon — not biology. Hardware hoovers data from the field, processes it using AI and machine learning algorithms and sends orders to automated machinery that doses out chemicals onto the field.  
 
Using silicon to manage our farms is a bit like your doctor diagnosing you based solely on the data from your FitBit device. It’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s far less effective than a blood test or a biopsy. In much the same way, silicon-based sensors can tell you how much rain has fallen or how acidic your soil is, but they’re no substitute for getting information directly from plants about how thirsty they are or what kind of stresses they’re experiencing. 
 
What’s needed is a more direct approach that restores our understanding of farming as the management of living organisms and that gleans actionable data directly from our crops. My own company envisions the solution as living sensors — plants that can communicate the presence of specific stressors hours after they emerge by sending out an easy-to-detect optical signal. By reading the messages their crops send out, farmers can capture rich, biologically driven signals that originate from individual plants and don’t require complex hardware or a degree in data science to interpret.  
Other bio-first startups and research programs are on the horizon. McKinsey has identified around 400 high-value use-cases for biologically driven innovation, many in agricultural contexts, with a potential economic impact of $4 trillion over the next 10 to 20 years. By bringing us closer to our plants, such innovations will help farmers make smarter, more plant-focused decisions even as they automate their operations.  
Greener Fields 
As our population grows and fewer people choose careers in farming, machinery and automated technologies will become ever more crucial to help us bring in our crops. But AI tools are only as good as the data you feed them and the assumptions you make when training your algorithms. As the old adage says: garbage in, garbage out. We need smarter, more plant-centric data in order to keep automated tools firmly anchored in the real world and to ensure that we’re taking action based on the actual needs of our crops rather than on abstracted digital models.  
That’s especially important as climate change alters the world around us. By introducing biological data into the farming process, we can learn to work with the planet, not against it, and ensure our automated farming systems remain sensitive and responsive to the changing needs of our plants. With biological inputs to guide us, we’ll be able to develop smarter farming methods that are scalable but also sustainable over periods of years or decades.  
We’ll also be able to make farming more economically sustainable because plant-centric data delivers value through the whole supply chain. If a potato plant can proactively let you know when it’s attacked by fungus, for instance, you can take cost-effective steps to fix the problem early on instead of learning about it later, once the potatoes have already been shipped off to Frito-Lay for processing. 
Knowledge, Not Information 
T.S. Eliot memorably asked: “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” That’s the crux of the challenge we’re now facing in farming: We’re awash in data, but much of it is derived from hardware and silicon, not from the plants themselves. We need real knowledge, not just abstract information, to help us make smarter decisions as we automate our agricultural systems.   
That might sound like a bit of a pipe dream. But the truth is that we’re rapidly gaining the biological know-how and new technologies we need to move beyond the current hardware-dependent status quo. At the end of the day, farming isn’t about bits and bytes, it’s about cotton and tomatoes and soybeans — living plants that exist in well-tended soil, not on a hard drive or a data server. It’s by listening to what plants are telling us, not fussing around with silicon, that we’ll be able to sow the seeds of a truly sustainable agricultural revolution. 
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We need a new wave of biological innovations to drive sustainable agriculture

Council Post: Farming Should Be About Plants, Not Hardware