Google parent company Alphabet added a new mining company to its portfolio this week.
Miner’s launch news for the fully-fledged Alphabet company came in the form of a blog by Miner CEO Elliott Grant (formerly of Shopwell, a marketplace startup sold to Enit). According to Grant, the mission behind Mines is to “help scale sustainable agriculture,” what they’re doing is “developing a platform and tools to help collect, organize, and understand information about the plant world that was previously unknown or misunderstood — and useful and actionable.”
According to Miner, they have analyzed more than 10% of the total agricultural land on Earth, mapped more than 200 plant traits, phenotyped 17 crop varieties, and developed more than 80 high-performance MLs. Mining Ag-optimized diagnostic tools are used to process large unstructured global agricultural data from satellite imagery, farm equipment, public databases and mining’s own proprietary data streams. The company combines this information with their personal data to make it available to partners to gain insights into production, genomics and agricultural research.
One such partner is Driscoll’s. The largest berry company is working with mining to improve data collection on its breeding operations and work on better yield forecasting. The two also worked together to improve Berry’s detection using machine learning tools, according to Driscoll, creating a system that many believed could perform the same task for human experts.
Another mining project was the creation of a special crop-moving robot called Miner Don Roverto. Don Roverto used it to understand and identify hidden crop traits in the world’s largest collection of beans to accelerate their work at the Mineral Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT. Using Don Roverto, the Alliance, after a thirty-year search, discovered a “magic” bean with an intrinsic drought-resistant trait.
Google often uses X to create mission-driven startups, and Miner is no different. According to Grant, they chose Ag as a vertical because it is “widely believed to be a major contributor to the climate crisis, but also a victim of climate change.” There is no time to waste in finding climate-resistant crop varieties, transitioning to less chemical and fossil fuel-friendly practices, improving soil health, and restoring biodiversity.
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