Speaking to AgTechNavigator at the sidelines of the recent World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in the UK, Key elaborated on the types of tech being eyed by Gates Ag One to advance its mission of accelerating agricultural innovations for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Gates Foundation’s agtech arm is currently focussed on innovations that lead to improved varieties of six priority crops: cassava, cowpea, maize,ga rice, soybean and sorghum. Its initial portfolio of research grants is focused on taking advantage of plant biology to increase the productivity and resilience of crops that are central to smallholder agricultural systems.
The types of innovation being eyed by Gates Foundation’s agtech arm in its quest to improve the lives of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have potential to be deployed in richer nations, says Trey Key, director, business development, Bill & Melinda Gates Agricultural Innovations (Gates Ag One). The needs of farmers globally are not dissimilar, he says. But ag requires more time for technology integration compared to other sectors, he warns.
These projects include: Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which targets improvements in photosynthesis, given just 1% of sunlight is currently converted to support plant growth; Enabling Nutrient Symbioses in Agriculture (ENSA), a Cambridge University-led project focused on maximising naturally occurring processes to enhance nutrient uptake; and Cassava Source-Sink (CASS), which unites researchers from 11 institutions around the world to optimize cassava physiology.
Scientists working with the ENSA project have identified a genetic regulator of nitrogen fixation in model legumes for the first time, creating the possibility of unlocking continuous nitrogen fixation. The potential to flip the genetic “off switch” and ensure legumes convert nitrogen into nutrients regardless of the soil conditions could improve not only the yield of legume crops but also the amount of nitrogen left in the soil for subsequent crops, boosting their harvests as well, according to Dugald Reid, group leader at the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food.
Scope for global deployment
There’s also scope for these types of innovation to be deployed in high income countries, according to Key. The challenges faced by smallholder farmers are similar to those faced by growers the world over, he said, citing the need to respond to climate change, the challenges of pests and diseases, and the need for yield productivity.
“If you can bring an improved symbiosis and reduced nitrogen requirements to a corn plant, there would be interest from farmers in any country in the world looking to reduce their synthetic nitrogen,” he said.
Agtech needs more time for integration compared to other sectors
But he stressed that time is a significant barrier for this type of technology to scale. "We are seeing some quite promising evolution from a regulatory front and several countries are quite clearly showing their willingness to develop and manage their own regulatory system… but we have to be realistic. This is agriculture and we're not able to iterate at the speed of software machine learning. We have to wait a year for a seed to be produced and there's only several times of year when it makes sense to test it in the environment. So there's a patience requirement that is a pretty significant barrier.”
