I sat down with Brad Zamft, the co-founder and CEO of Heritable Agriculture, to take a deep dive into all the science (both biology and computer science) behind the effort to program plants, why it’s needed and what impacts it might have. 

Episode links: 

• Heritable Agriculture: https://heritable.ag/
• Heritable goes after indoor strawberries: https://heritable.ag/heritable-strawberries 
• The sustainability threat of farming: https://vlsci.com/blog/top-issues-in-agriculture-2024/ ; https://www.epa.gov/climateimpacts/climate-change-impacts-agriculture-and-food-supply
• The risks of monoculture and monocropping: https://foodrevolution.org/blog/monocropping-monoculture/
• The promise of regenerative agriculture: https://theclimatecenter.org/our-work/research/report-the-promise-of-regenerative-agriculture/
• Farming resiliency in the face of climate change: https://sustainability.mit.edu/article/making-agriculture-more-resilient-climate-change

Outline

0:00 – Intro

2:18 – Brad’s journey to Heritable Agriculture

9:29 – Why we need programmable plants

14:23 – Challenges of biology

19:38 – Validating the models

22:14 – How does this all physically work? 

31:05 – The challenge of adjusting 2 billion years of evolutionary success

34:48 – The risks of AI cracking plant DNA

39:50 – Regenerative Agriculture and tuning for resiliency in the face of climate change

47:53 – How farmers view the approach

51:59 – Tree adjustments

56:28 – The future outlook

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Artificial intelligence is a complicated topic, bound by a number of complex threads — technical science, ethics, safety, regulation, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, investment and — above all — humanity. On The Deep View: Conversations, Ian Krietzberg, host and Editor-in-Chief at The Deep View, breaks it all down, cutting through the hype to make clear what's important and why you should care.