NC State Plant Sciences Initiative Developing AI Resources for Agriculture

Jul 10, 2024

By Lily Burton

Researchers at North Carolina State University and the N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative (PSI) are working to bring artificial intelligence technologies to agriculture.

AI has many potential applications in agriculture. But the industry doesn’t currently have the same resources that have enabled AI development in other fields. NC State researchers are trying to change that.

Chris Reberg-Horton, the Platform Director for the PSI at NC State, is working with his team to collect images of weeds that will be used to teach AI-powered equipment to recognize them and differentiate them from other plants.

“We have a robot set up that drives across an area that has lots of different weed species planted in pots out there,” he said. “And so, we can image, right now, about 500 pots a day through that system.”

Reberg-Horton said existing high tech agricultural equipment has the potential to observe and deliver precise care for individual plants.

“What's been missing is the knowledge and intelligence of field conditions to be able to inform that smart equipment of what to do,” he said. “And so, I really think that, you know, AI, and specifically, computer vision is one of the missing pieces in that.”

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids