[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Agriculture is a big contributor to climate change.
It's also a major victim of climate change.
It consumes 70% of the world's fresh water.
It's responsible for about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.
Farmers in the Global South, for example, are seeing more extreme weather conditions
droughts, floods, unpredictable weather events
that are making it really hard for them to grow.
Unless we fix agriculture, we won't solve climate change
and we won't be able to feed everyone on the planet.
Our mission at X is to invent radical new solutions
to some of the world's hardest problems.
Mineral is X's project in sustainable agriculture.
The genesis of Project Mineral was the insight that
to manage the complexity of growing food sustainably
we'd need completely new ways of understanding the plant world.
Mineral's philosophy is
how do we partner with other experts, other companies in the agricultural system
to solve together some of these intractable problems?
What's at stake is human survival, to a certain extent.
We have one billion people hungry, we have a planetary crisis
and we see food at the center of that.
CGIAR's mission is about transforming food and land
and water systems in a climate crisis.
But in simple words, feeding the planet in a sustainable way.
One of the key things CGIAR does is improve varieties of crops.
Here in this facility, what we work on is beans.
We're working to improve bean varieties
so farmers have the means to produce beans in a changing climate
increase their nutritional status
increase their income
give them the seed and the ability to improve their livelihoods.
We have 36,000 different types of bean collected.
Every single one has a story to tell
and could be the solution to so many of our planetary challenges out there.
Many of these beans have been collected
over the last hundred years from around the world.
And what's really fascinating is
most of these beans have never been characterized.
The researchers don't know how these beans grow
what they look like, what environments they would thrive in.
So, we've partnered with them to use our technology
to understand those beans' capabilities for the first time.
It took us 30 years to produce a drought-tolerant bean
where we found the trait for drought tolerance
in one of these beans in the collection.
With the technology of Mineral, we can move into absolute precision
in finding these types of traits much quicker, much cheaper
and much more efficiently.
A crop breeder today or a plant researcher today
will go into the field during the growing season
and observe every plant in that field.
They'll use their senses
they'll use a yard stick
they'll use a notepad
and they're trying to measure as much detail as they can for those plants.
Imagine trying to do that in a field with a million plants in it.
The Mineral Rover is the combination of a number of cutting-edge technologies.
We've taken the best of robotics and optics
and machine learning and high-performance computing
and put them all together in this first-of-its-kind machine
that can go through a field and image every single plant
with unprecedented detail.
The Rover is counting pods, counting leaves
counting individual beans in ways we could never have done before.
It's doing it faster, it's doing it more frequently
and we can get new traits and new characteristics
that we weren't able to get with human labor.
The opportunity that we have in front of us
is to combine the capabilities of the Mineral Rover
with the expertise of plant breeders
to accelerate the discovery of crops
that will transform the lives of millions of farmers
and the people who rely on them around the world.
More than 90% of beans that are consumed globally
will at one stage have passed through this facility.
A bean sounds very trivial
but it could be the solution to so many things.
We could be looking at reducing deforestation.
We could be looking at adapting to the climate crisis.
We could be improving child development
in the first thousand days through better nutrition.
It's so much more than just a bean.
Farmers have tremendous intuition about what's right for them on their farm.
We see our job as to invent new technologies
that can help them better understand the plant world.
And that way they can create innovations
that solve the problem of sustainable agriculture.
Mineral is developing new technologies
to help build a more sustainable
more resilient, and a more productive food system
and, ultimately, meet the world's growing demand for food.