Is AI about to transform food production?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2026
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We go right to the cutting edge of food production and glimpse into the future of farming.
Farmers are increasingly using artificial intelligence-powered machines to try to maximise their crops and reduce their spiralling costs.
We speak to farmers, those behind the AI systems, and hear concerns about the growing use of automation in agriculture.
If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Presented and produced by Rob Young
Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.
Each episode is a 17-minute deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.
Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, why bond markets are so powerful, China's property bubble, and Gen Z's experience of the current job market.
We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include Google's Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and the CEO of Starbucks, Brian Niccol.
(Picture: Farmer inspects humidity of sunflower crops with AI driven software on laptop at dusk. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Rob Young. Today we'll be glimpsing into the future of farming and how artificial intelligence could transform the way we grow food. |
| 0:21.3 | This is going to completely revolutionist agriculture. Precision farming can essentially transform |
| 0:26.7 | the bottom line of farmers across the globe. |
| 0:29.5 | The promise, more food, using less water and with lower costs, but there are warnings too. |
| 0:36.9 | As in any sort of data-driven endeavoravour, you've heard of garbage in garbage out, and this holds even more true for AI. |
| 0:44.8 | That is the cutting edge of agriculture on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:09.2 | Picture this, a farm in California that hasn't changed much in decades, flat land, stretching for miles, rows of leafy green vegetables almost as far as the eye can see. |
| 1:19.7 | But where workers ones bent under the hot California sun, putting up weeds and applying fertilizer, there is now a one-million-dollar machine powered by artificial intelligence. |
| 1:26.4 | It looks a bit like a futuristic combine harvester. |
| 1:30.3 | Third-generation farmer Daniel Alameda says finding workers has been tough, |
| 1:36.3 | and this machine is doing a job nobody enjoyed anyway. |
| 1:39.3 | So mainly what we've been using AI for is differentiating between a plant and a weed. |
| 1:49.0 | And I know that sounds very simple, but it's actually very difficult to do. |
| 1:54.0 | For lack of better term, a weed is an invasive plant, something in that field that we do not want there. Why is that? |
| 2:01.6 | Weeds compete for the same thing that a head of lettuce does. |
| 2:05.6 | They compete for nutrients, water, sunlight, and they also harbor invasive pests. |
| 2:11.6 | So we have to remove them from the field. |
| 2:14.6 | So our biggest challenge is removing unwanted plants from the field that have |
| 2:19.6 | traditionally been done with people. So we have to distinguish the difference between a plant that we |
| 2:27.1 | want there and a weed that we do not want. And I suppose in a field of spinach, anything that's green |
| 2:32.7 | looks like spinach. Correct. If all things are green in a field of spinach, anything that's green looks like spinach? Correct. If all things |
... |
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