Syngenta Vegetable Seeds has established a collaboration with Heritable Agriculture that will use AI to help determine the best vegetable varieties to offer growers.
With vegetable and seed companies offering hundreds or even thousands of varieties, identifying the best placement of varieties for growers across a range of markets can be difficult. Traditional seed companies will spend many hours evaluating data, trialing different varieties and sourcing feedback from growers and the value chain. While these inputs are still important, technology now offers a way to accelerate these decisions, the partners said.
Using historical data on geographical conditions and crop trialing, Heritable will use AI tools alongside Syngenta’s product portfolio, with the aim of predicting the best performing commercial varieties in different regions.
“Planting the right seed is critical to a grower’s success. New technologies, such as AI, can help us bring the best innovation to the field or greenhouse,” said Matthew Johnston, global head of vegetable seeds and flowers at Syngenta.
Syngenta added that that the Heritable team is “Dissecting the interaction between genetics and environment, weather conditions, soil variable and additional proprietary data.” If successful, the Heritable technology will be able to predict scalable vegetable seed performance for a grower anywhere in the world, up to a 10-meter resolution.
Brad Zamft, CEO of Heritable Agriculture added: “This collaboration with [Syngenta’s] vegetable seeds team is a great example of the kinds of markets and applications that can be embraced when targeting the latest AI towards all portions of the agricultural industry.”
Heritable Agriculture, which is focused on using AI in agriculture, was a project originally incubated inside Google X, Alphabet’s so-called ‘moonshot factory’ which aims to launch technologies that can have a significant impact on the world’s most intractable problems.
This partnership with Heritable Agriculture extends Syngenta’s use of AI after the company said, at the start of 2025, that it would partner with TraitSeq to use AI and speed up the development of new biostimulants.TraitSeq has a proprietary platform that leverages AI to analyse complex biological data to reveal molecular interactions that impact a crop’s ability to utilise available nutrients in the soil. Once specific biomarkers can be identified it is hoped that it will be possible to quickly and accurately assess the efficiency of new biostimulants.
Further reading
Get more science and innovation news every month in Chemistry & Industry magazine. You can subscribe to C&I here.
Visit Blog