Gates Foundation selects Mathematica to lead consortium to develop a new AI-powered agricultural decision-support tool

The Gates Foundation has selected Mathematica to lead an initiative to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered platform that will help agricultural organizations and development agencies make faster, evidence-informed decisions about which agronomic practices are most likely to work in specific local conditions.

Mathematica is leading a consortium with the University of Maryland and NASA Harvest to build the platform by applying a user-centered design approach. The project will initially focus on Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria before expanding to other countries.

“Organizations that invest in agricultural development projects shouldn’t have to spend months combing through academic journals before making important design decisions,” said Anthony Louis D’Agostino, co-principal investigator and acting director of Mathematica’s Data Innovation Lab. “Our goal is to support the scale-up of agricultural practices that have been shown in the literature to be effective but whose appropriateness for a particular location is not yet known.”

Although evidence on the impacts of agricultural practices is abundant, using this evidence to predict outcomes for a particular investment or location can be difficult. The AI-powered tool will explicitly account for differences in weather conditions, soil characteristics, and other relevant factors to help users estimate how certain agricultural practices could affect outcomes such as crop yields and agricultural revenue. The tool will use new computational approaches to extract insights from thousands of empirical studies on agronomic practices and combine those findings with predictive models and geospatial data.

“By combining satellite imagery, AI, crop models, and agricultural research, we’re creating a tool that helps organizations answer questions such as ‘Which practices could lead to higher yields than our current approach?’ and ‘Which locations should we prioritize as we scale up successful pilot studies?’” said Ritvik Sahajpal, co-principal investigator, associate research professor at the University of Maryland, and crop-condition co-lead at NASA Harvest.

The tool, which will be publicly accessible, is intended to help organizations translate broad evidence about what works into practical decisions about what to fund and implement in a particular context.

“Agricultural organizations need better ways to turn research into action,” said Richard Caldwell, senior program officer at the Gates Foundation. “This tool has the potential to make evidence more accessible and help guide investments toward practices that are most likely to succeed in local contexts.”