Oracle and Wild Bio collab to advance AI-powered agriculture

Oxford-based Wild Bio, a spin-out company, has teamed up with technology giant Oracle to harness AI for advancing agricultural resilience and carbon capture through crops. The collaboration, announced in July, will employ Oracle's cloud and IoT technologies to aid Wild Bio's field research. The two companies aim to enhance crop productivity amidst environmental stress and develop carbon-absorbing crop varieties.

Wild Bio, founded in 2021 by Dr. Ross Hendron and Prof. Steve Kelly, focuses on crop genetics. The partnership will see Wild Bio gathering field data using Oracle's technology, integrating it into a cloud environment, and then applying AI to analyze the data, thereby informing future research. Oracle's AI can analyze real-time data from field trials, assessing soil moisture, plant performance, and environmental conditions.

This analysis will create a detailed, field-level measurement system of how much carbon specific crops are removing.

Oracle's CEO, Clay Magouyrk, sees AI as a tool that can learn from millions of years of plant evolution to identify traits that enhance crop performance. Professor Steve Kelly, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Wild Bio, emphasized that the partnership aims to tackle the global challenges of climate change and food security by creating crops that perform better under stress while also helping to absorb atmospheric CO2.

Kelly added that the collaboration will enable the organization to measure the performance of their crops in the field, contributing to a holistic solution for these pressing global issues.

The collaboration will also align with Oracle's broader sustainability strategy, including its commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Earlier this year, Wild Bio acquired F1 Seed, a wheat breeding business, to form a fully integrated, end-to-end UK seed company. This acquisition enables the company to design, breed, and deliver new wheat varieties for growers.