Artificial intelligence and agriculture: Transforming plant breeding for a sustainable future

Plant Breeding is a reliable assurance of agriculture productivity and nutritional security, while information technologies offer efficient means of fostering advancements in plant variety development. Processing large amounts of multidimensional breeding data over generations is complex, even though breeding information technologies provide an accessible and scientifically sound approach. Therefore, decision support tools help breeders to extract relevant and valuable information by introducing the golden seed breeding cloud platform. This platform is a cutting-edge AI driven agriculture system designed to maximize seed breeding for increased sustainability, resilience and yield. This brought a paradigm shift in farming by developing AI-powered solutions. To accomplish data integration and feature identification for stress phenotyping, it is necessary to take advantage of machine learning algorithms to extract patterns and features from the massive repository of data. Currently, plant breeding is propelling a revolution driven by state-of-the-art amenities for crop phenotyping and genome sequencing. Advanced phenotyping and genotyping when coupled with machine learning and cognitive sciences, are improving the accuracy of identifying the underlying genetic causes of attributes. Another advancement i.e., Next-generation AI using big data envisages how it can deal with the challenges by interfacing with the multi-omics big data to accelerate plant breeding, particularly for climate-resilient agriculture. Successful implementation of the proposed model based on big data characteristics will facilitate the evolution of breeding from “art” to “science” and eventually to “intelligence” in the era of Artificial Intelligence.