Will AI conquer herbicide resistance? Ultra-precise targeting removes weeds with next to no impact on anything else

Weeds are growing resistant to the herbicides already on the market, and agribusiness companies like Bayer are in a desperate search for new modes of action to help farmers kill them.

Bayer’s Icafolin product will be its first new mode of action herbicide in some 30 years when it launches in Brazil in 2028.

Frank Terhorst, executive vice president of strategy and sustainability at Bayer’s Crop Science Division, told Reuters on [June 17] that AI could help speed up finding that next new mode of action.

“You want to find the one where you have maximum performance on what you want to kill – weeds, and basically no impact on everything else. And that balance is extremely difficult,” Terhorst told Reuters after an event in Chicago.

Related on the SLP

Weeds have long been the bane of farmers. Will the future be different? Why are we not eating more cell-based meat? Blame over-regulation, protectionist states, and skeptical consumers

Kennedy faces Congressional ethics investigation for accepting massive gifts from anti-vaccine and ketamine wellness grifter

Unintended consequences: Hegseth’s proposed controversial ‘low testosterone’ screen could flag 150,000 Army men. What happens next?  

It’s the ‘juice’: What the AI data center wars are really all about

AI, he said, helps the company match the protein structure of a weed with a molecule that targets that structure, and enables it to use huge amounts of data.

It is a faster process, he said, and there are fewer dropouts.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here