Big Data Is Transforming How Scientists Create Better Seeds

Extract from KCUR and NPR (Amy Mayer)

Syngenta’s Joseph Bryum, who leads the company’s computational sciences team, says agricultural researchers can learn from how other companies exploit data science.

“How do we bring mathematics to a field in the way that it has in a lot of other industries, whether you’re FedEx, Chevron, Microsoft, Google?” he says. “Now we’re just trying to bring that to agriculture.”

Advances in technology have always brought changes to our food system and big companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta have massive research budgets. Big Data is the latest interdisciplinary approach. Byrum’s team includes biologists, agronomists, mathematicians – even an experimental physicist. Once you present a problem in a way everyone can work on, he says, the broad-based approach to solving it reaps rewards. That, in turn, attracts top talent.

“There’s this impression that this type of innovation needs to occur in Silicon Valley or a place like Boston,” he says, “and the level of innovation that’s actually occurring in Des Moines, Iowa, I think, is extraordinary.”