Deep Dive: David Guerena on the Future of Agriculture

About this episode

Astro Teller discusses the future of agriculture and plant breeding with David Guerena.

In the sixth installment of our Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive series, X’s Captain of Moonshots, Astro Teller, discusses plant breeding and the future of agriculture with Agricultural Scientist, David Guerena. David works with The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) — a partner of Mineral, X’s moonshot for computational agriculture. They discuss plant breeding, the challenges facing smallholder farmers around the world, and how the tools Mineral developed are helping plant breeders grow more resilient crops. For more on Mineral’s impact on agriculture, check out Episode 4 of The Moonshot Podcast, “Feeding the World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQS3lY6pRvY And to learn more about how Mineral’s technology is being used by public plant breeding programs in the Global South, check out The Artemis Project: https://alliancebioversityciat.org/projects/artemis 00:00 - Introduction 1:09 - Why humans eat certain plants 3:20 - How plants have historically been domesticated 4:53 - The origins of plant breeding 6:52 - The changing face of plant breeding 8:42 - Gene banks that preserve genetic diversity 10:22 - Helping small farmers with plant breeding 12:33 - How David’s…

People in this episode

Host: Astro Teller

Guest: David Guerena

Topics covered

• agriculture
• plant breeding
• smallholder farmers
• resilient crops
• technology in agriculture

Keywords

• agriculture
• plant breeding
• smallholder farmers
• resilient crops
• technology

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Mineral, CIAT, CGIAR

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