Bayer turns to AI to combat herbicide resistance faster

By Renee Hickman

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Bayer’s agricultural science division is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence in its battle against crop-killing weeds, the company told Reuters.

Weeds are becoming resistant to herbicides already on the market, and agribusiness companies like Bayer are desperately looking for new ways to help farmers eliminate them.

Bayer’s Icafolin product will be its first new mode-of-action herbicide in around 30 years when it is launched in Brazil in 2028.

Frank Terhorst, executive vice president of strategy and sustainability at Bayer’s Crop Science Division, told Reuters on Monday that AI could help accelerate the discovery of the next new mode of action.

“You want to find the one where it has maximum performance on what you want to kill – weeds, and basically no impact on everything else. And that balance is extremely difficult,” Terhorst told Reuters after an event in Chicago.

AI, he said, helps the company match the protein structure of an herb with a molecule that targets that structure and allows it to utilize enormous amounts of data.

It’s a faster process, he said, and there are fewer dropouts.

Bob Reiter, head of agricultural science research and development at Bayer, said in a statement that with AI tools, the timeline for discovering the next new mode of action could be much shorter.

“If we just take the example of initial research, we have at least three times the number of new modes of action today compared to ten years ago,” he said.

(Reporting by Renee Hickman; Editing by Josie Kao)