September 05, 2025

Deep Dive: David Guerena on the Future of Agriculture

1 hour 7 minutes

In the sixth installment of our Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive series, X’s Captain of Moonshots, Astro Teller, discusses plant breeding and the future of agriculture with Agricultural Scientist, David Guerena. David works with The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) — a partner of Mineral, X’s moonshot for computational agriculture. They discuss plant breeding, the challenges facing smallholder farmers around the world, and how the tools Mineral developed are helping plant breeders grow more resilient crops.

For more on Mineral’s impact on agriculture, check out Episode 4 of The Moonshot Podcast, “Feeding the World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQS3lY6pRvY

And to learn more about how Mineral’s technology is being used by public plant breeding programs in the Global South, check out The Artemis Project: https://alliancebioversityciat.org/projects/artemis

00:00 - Introduction

1:09 - Why humans eat certain plants

3:20 - How plants have historically been domesticated

4:53 - The origins of plant breeding

6:52 - The changing face of plant breeding

8:42 - Gene banks that preserve genetic diversity

10:22 - Helping small farmers with plant breeding

12:33 - How David’s career started

14:00 - The process of identifying and cataloguing plants

23:32 - CIAT and CGIAR’s partnership with Mineral

26:13 - Mineral’s technology

32:59 - Unexpected findings from Mineral’s early days

38:40 - Solving for the biggest challenges in plant breeding

40:08 - Phenotyping 101

41:06 - The impact of Mineral’s technology

44:39 - The challenges of existing breeding systems

50:10 - The future of computational agriculture

57:00 - The impact of AI on plant breeders and farmers

59:19 - A surprising insight about bean cooking time

1:01:47 - The future of plant breeding

1:03:58 - David, finally, talks about Bruno

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By X, The Moonshot Factory

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