AI-based AgTech solution

Can artificial intelligence and data science make food tastier and healthier? Benson Hill, a St. Louis-based agtech firm, thinks so and has won an award to bolster that claim. The crop-improvement company won the AI-based AgTech Solution of the Year award from AgTech Breakthrough, a market-intelligence company that honors the top global products in agtech.

Benson Hill’s AI-based crop design platform, CropOS, speeds up the process of crop breeding, which historically has been a lengthy slog of trial and error. It has also often brought unwelcome tradeoffs when, for example, a plant characteristic improves yield but compromises protein content.

By combining data science and machine learning with biology and genetics, CropOS allows proprietary phenotyping, predictive breeding, and environmental modeling algorithms. That’s a fancy way of saying AI can make our food more sustainable, healthier, and tastier.