31-minute listen/watch | 18-minute read | 1-minute teaser
Smallholder farmers, despite facing enormous challenges, produce a significant portion of the world's food, especially in regions like Africa and Asia. PlantVillage, a project aimed at empowering these farmers through smartphone technology and machine learning, has grown into a global initiative with ambitious plans to expand its impact and address the growing threat of climate change.
Transcript
David Hughes
The world is in a terrible place in terms of climate change and food. And the question is, if not us to solve it, then who? It's not going to be Google. It's not going to be Apple. It's not going to be governments. So, it has to be research-based science that updates prior beliefs on a daily basis. It's what we've done historically, and it's what we can do into the future.
Host
Welcome to Growing Impact, a podcast by the Institute of Energy and the Environment at Penn State. Each month, Growing Impact explores the projects of Penn State researchers who are solving some of the world's most challenging energy and environmental issues. Each project has been funded by the Institute's Seed Grant Program that grows new research ideas into impactful energy and environmental solutions. I'm your Host, Kevin Sliman.
Smallholder farmers are the unsung heroes of our food system. Tilling tiny plots, they produce a staggering one-third of the world's food and up to 80% of the food supply in regions like sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. But these vital contributors face immense challenges such as climate change, pests, insufficient finances, and limited education and training.
On this episode of Growing Impact, we are revisiting the story of PlantVillage, a project funded as a seed grant by IEE in 2016. Its aim was to empower smallholder farmers with knowledge through smartphones and machine learning. Since its creation, PlantVillage has gained strong support from organizations worldwide and has built a robust team of partners and collaborators.
Looking ahead, PlantVillage plans to expand how it's helping farmers while simultaneously addressing climate change.
David Hughes
Hey Kevin, how are you doing?
Host
Good, David, how are you?
David Hughes
Grand. I'm grand.
Host
Excellent. Thanks so much for taking time to talk with me.
David Hughes
No problem.
Host
Can you just introduce yourself? Can you provide your name, title, and a brief background on your research?
David Hughes
Yeah. So it's a pleasure to be here. My name is David Hughes. I'm the Dorothy and Lloyd Huck Chair in Global Food Security here at Penn State University. I'm also the founder of a global public good at Penn State called PlantVillage. It's been here for about 12 years now. I also have the honor of being the director of the USAID Current and Emerging Threats to Crops Innovation Lab. It's a large effort by the U.S. government to support research around food security. And I'm the founder of a spin-out company called PlantVillage Plus at Penn State, partially owned by Penn State. And I'm also the co-founder with a Penn State student, Kate Ott, of a charity called the Village Youth Fund.
Host
So as the founder of PlantVillage and you, you already gave a brief description: “an organization devoted to providing information and support to smallholder farmers around the world so they can successfully produce food.” Can you tell us about the start of this effort? And for folks listening just for reference, as David mentioned, it's been more than a decade since this has been started. But IEE's connection started in 2016. It was part of a seed grant ask in 2016. So can you talk a little bit about the start of this effort?
David Hughes
Yeah, I came to Penn State in 2011, and I came from Harvard where I was doing a European Union fellowship. And I really knew nothing about the U.S. land grants. I had been previously at Copenhagen University, a very old university, 600 years old. Harvard's about 400 years old. I was then, did my PhD to Oxford, which is about 800 years old, and I knew nothing about this young upstart system of universities, which are the American land grants, which go back to 1862.
And I was blown away on day one. I came down to visit Andrew Read, who wanted to recruit me here. And it's a particularly unique type of university system that was established here in this country to do applied research: research, education, extension. And so when I came here, I said, well, I've worked all around the world.
I come out of the rainforest in Africa. I walk on the farms, which don't have the kind of resources we would have here in Centre County or Bucks County or whatever. Why can't we have that? Because I understood back in 2011 and 2012 that the supercomputer, which is a smartphone, is only going to get better and better and better, and particularly because of AI.
So I asked the University, the Huck Institutes, the Huck family, who have given a donation to the University, I asked, can we have some money? And they very kindly gave me $120,000. This was Andrew Read at the time and Pete Hudson and Vivek Kapur. And the idea was to start this as a side project.
So I was still doing my research on rain forest ecology, but I started to build what I wanted to become – and what I still want to become – a land-grant university in a phone. An evolution of what we've been doing as a farmer's field school since 1855. But just taking it into not a land-grant, but a cloud grant.
And the idea is that can we leverage the AI and cloud structures to give the kind of knowledge that a farmer here in Centre County or elsewhere would have from our Extension services, we give that to the globe at zero cost and with all the technology that we can bring to bear from satellite systems and AI. So that's the idea of PlantVillage.
PlantVillage at Penn State is constantly evolving, constantly adapting to new technologies. But we're just carrying on an old tradition started here in 1855 as the second land-grant in the country after Michigan.
Host
Could you describe and maybe go into a little bit of detail on how PlantVillage assists farmers, specifically things like with climate change challenges, hotter temperatures, extreme weather?
David Hughes
Farmers necessarily need to have expertise at the farm gate. They need to have somebody come along and help them diagnose problem A, B, or C, and that's the basis of extension, which we have here at Penn State, which began in Dublin, my hometown, in 1846 during the famine. So since that time, we've been developing advice delivery via humans.
The problem is, in Africa, we lack human expertise. The ratio between extension workers and farmers is maybe one extension worker for 3000 farmers, or sometimes 12,000 farmers. So farmers just don't get to see them. But in every village there is a phone. So we develop AI systems inside the phone to work offline that are either as good as human experts or better.
And that means a farmer can hold her phone over the plant and have a diagnosis. And this uses AI inside the phone. So now the farmer can know if she has some problem, like a viral disease of cassava or insect damage. But then we expanded it. And then we also provide weather advisory services. So we take information from NASA, NOAA, and a U.S.-funded effort called Climate Hazards Center in California.
And we then deliver that information via TV and radio. So we reach about 15.9 million people every season via TV and radio with local partners. We also send out messages via SMS. So we have partners where we send messages out. And that might tell you the amount of rain you're going to have next week is X versus Y.
So you can make that planning decisions. And we've actually gone a little bit further now. We've set up these companies in the countries we work. We set up eight companies, and those companies are selling inputs. This is an old idea. It's what we've done in this country for 100 years. We sell inputs to farmers to help them get through hard times, but also benefit from good weather, which is expected so you can grow more produce and sell more.
Host
You have continued to rattle off names and groups that are partnering and or supporting this. Can you talk a little bit about the growth of that, and how partners are seeing this as something they want to be a part of?
David Hughes
You know when I looked at Penn State and thought, okay, let's have a land-grant in a phone, my first point of call was the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. So back in 2012, I began knocking on their door. Eventually, in 2018, they let me in to become a UN fellow. So I spent my sabbatical year in Rome as a UN fellow, and I brought our technology, which is a global public good, I brought that to United Nations, and that was scaled out to over 65 countries and about 35 languages. And then in 2020, I was asked to go back to Rome to brief the then-cabinet secretary, Sonny Perdue, the Secretary of Agriculture, about fall armyworm. But then another crisis came along, which was the explosion of locusts across the Horn of Africa.
And so we adapted our technology to that. And so now we developed something called eLocust3m for FAO and in 2020, 2021, we were responsible for helping FAO save the food for 41 million people at a value of $1.7 billion. And so we're just... and the reason was because the locust happened during the time of Covid. So it was a crisis within a crisis.
And as we all remember, Covid stopped the business as usual of moving around the world and doing the things that we would normally do in international agriculture. But the young people were still present in the country with smartphones connected to satellites, so we could still track and trace the locust swarm, so we could then send airplanes to spray them.
And so the UN has been a really big partner for us scaling this out to global groups. We also work with an international consortium called CGIAR, which is a consultative group for international agricultural research. A lot of research stations post-World War II around the world, and we work with them. So we take the knowledge from their experts, and we put that into the phone.
Now, of course, having the honor of running an Innovation Lab, a USAID Innovation Lab, we're the Current and Emerging Threats to Crops Innovation Lab. We are part of that 21-lab network across the United States, funded by USAID. And so we collaborate with other land-grants, like Michigan State and Purdue and Cornell and Florida, and University of Maryland Eastern Shore, which is a HBCU.
And that's really, really rewarding because we want to leverage the long history that the U.S. land-grants have in giving farmers advice on what to do today, given the problems that we have. So what's really wonderful about the U.S. system is you can tell somebody what to do today. Like, I think you should do this about stinkbugs or spotted lanternfly.
And if you find new information next week, you just come back and say, hey, I found new information. So you keep updating. And that checks and balances in the system is exactly what's needed in the climate change. Because none of us know how to grow food under the current circumstances, and the ones we are going to expect in the future.
Host
The locust story is an astounding success story. Do you have any others that you might want to share? Other success stories where PlantVillage has made some really big impacts?
David Hughes
Yeah. So, locusts got a lot of headlines because there are literally biblical plagues. But the crop that most people are growing across Africa is corn or maize, as they call it. And so the maize crop is really impacted by a caterpillar, a hungry caterpillar that comes from the Americas called fall armyworm. It's an invasive pest that came into West Africa in about 2016, spread across about 74 countries all the way to Australia.
And now it's getting into the European Union. So it's spreading really, really fast. And we helped in terms of checking that, tracking, etc. But what's been really successful in 2024 and late 2023 was setting up a commercial situation whereby young people that we've created jobs for, as well as farmers we've created jobs for, are selling the solution, which is a little biological control. It's a little wasp that you release. You put these wasps out in the field. They go around, they find the caterpillars, they kill the caterpillars. And that's been really, really successful. And we've seen early results showing that when you're dispersing this parasitoid wasp, as it's called, you're seeing a 65% increase in your yields. So that's a little bit like me giving you a 65% raise.
It makes a difference. And not only is that great for the farmer, it's great for the community because it's creating jobs for the people who are producing all of these biological control agents, and it's also creating jobs for the farmers who are selling them to the neighbors. So we're really proud of this. It's part of our innovation lab effort.
And we've been really happy that we've been able to scale. We've so far produced 140 million of these wasps. So, so we do things at scale, which is really rewarding to see. And that's another success story we've had. And we hope going forward we're going to see more of this because fundamentally we need to create a positive feedback, through private sector where farmers pay for stuff. That worked really well in the United States. It should work across Africa.
Host
So we've talked a lot about Africa. Where else in the world is PlantVillage assisting?
David Hughes
Yeah. So we have a team PlantVillage Nepal. So that's our base of operations in Asia. We also have efforts through our innovation lab in Honduras. Other groups are using us. So there's about 36 companies in the private sector who are using PlantVillage software for carbon capture and removal. So they're using that around the world from Brazil to India.
And so they're people who are testing out, improving the software, and eventually going to pay for the software. So this is through this PlantVillage Plus spinoff company that we have. So we'll be selling the access to the software and the data so that we can have that sustainable business model, which is so important because PlantVillage has raised a lot of money over the last 12 years. But the amount of money we actually need is billions of dollars, not millions, because the size of the problem is so big. So that's where we go from South America to India, and a really a heavy focus on Africa.
Host
All around the world this is happening. And looking at your website, I can see the number of people who are helping with this. Could you talk a little bit about your teams, the collaborators and team members who are making this actually happen? Boots on the ground, people working with software, etcetera. This is an astounding group you've pulled together.
David Hughes
Yeah, we have about 220 people on the team in 12 countries and it ranges from PlantVillage Extension workers on the ground every day engaging with pastoralists or who have animals or people growing crops in multiple countries. A number of people are front facing with government officials, so we embed them in government offices. We have a large engineering team who, you know, work on the nuts and bolts of all of this.
We have a really great partnership with a company called (FoodEase?). And then we have our own engineers on team. We have people who are in the admin, the financing, the accountants. They kind of keep the whole thing running. And then, of course, there's a lot of reports to do for donors like USAID or the Gates Foundation.
So we really sort of lean into this “We Are” business, that is a slogan of the University. But we really strongly believe that PlantVillage is for everybody. It's a global public good. So the people that you would find in Malawi or Burkina Faso or Niger who are working every day on PlantVillage, they fundamentally believe that it belongs to them.
And it's true. You know, there's no exclusivity here. So long as you're... and this is why it's called PlantVillage, because it takes a village. So the idea is to crowd in as many people as possible, give them ownership. Because when you feel you own something, then you're going to work extra hard for it. And we find that to be true.
And we have developed these commercial models where in Burkina Faso, for example, we have a PlantVillage Burkina, set up by Romaric (Nebnoma Tiendrébéogo), one of our... the graduates of the university there, who is one of the directors, and he's directing this and he has a financial interest in it, and he's a young person. So let's imagine he could spend the next 35 years with PlantVillage and grow it up.
And I think that's the model. And that that's something that I think gives benefit to the maximum amount the people.
Host
Like you said, there's an ownership and an investment that the individuals in these countries are part of this. This isn't... you're not infusing people, all United States citizens, for example, or people from Europe or ... they're not... This is people from that area being part of the team. Is that making a major difference?
David Hughes
Yes, because first principles, this is their country, and they have the highest incentive. And we believe in insourcing, not outsourcing. So we don't need foreigners coming into their countries to, quote unquote, fix the problems. And so that's what Covid showed us. So when Covid prevented all of the movement of global experts, particularly from Europe into Africa, and we couldn't move in that direction because of the restrictions, we saw that, well, the African people we were engaging with in, say, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, they were able to download the app, connect to the satellite, and do the effective work that would have been done by Europeans.
And so we need to build up the capacity. And that's exactly what the land-grants do. When you think about the history of the land-grants going out to our 67 counties in Pennsylvania, they don't live there in those counties. They go; they give advice. The farmer takes the advice and then does their stuff, and then afterwards asks for more questions of our advice. So we want to build up the capacity. So, you know, give a man a fish, teach them how to fish, that sort of stuff.
Host
You spoke at the Climate Solutions Symposium in 2024, and you talked about climate change and its relationship to PlantVillage, but specifically on how you're thinking about expanding and leveraging smallholder farms and farmers to actually mitigate climate change. Can you talk a little bit about that idea, about carbon credits and that plan?
David Hughes
We have an enormous problem with climate change. We're not reducing our emissions at a fast enough rate. We're already guaranteed to reach, perhaps, 1.6, 1.7 degrees Celsius. A lot of scientists think we'll get to 2.6. So, we obviously need to reduce emissions as much as possible. But it's also very, very clear the CO2 in the atmosphere at the moment has to be pulled out of the atmosphere and removed durably.
And there's a number of ways you can do that. You can build big machines that suck it out, and they're very expensive. Or you can use photosynthesis, which is a 450-million-year-old invention that's very efficient. And the best place to do photosynthesis is across the equator. And that turns out to be where all our farmers are.
So we can leverage those farms to capture and store carbon. So we have this model called an AI-powered carbon capture cube. Every farm is a cube that can capture carbon. And the way it does that is by growing lots and lots of food, which is the first primary requirement of a farm. So, but if you have one kilogram of cassava, you've got 1.6kg of non-consumable biomass that you're not having.
So you can take that 1.6kg and you can do what's called pyrolysis. So you can heat it up at high temperatures in a low oxygen environment, basically baking it. And you can make coal, or charcoal, and you can put that coal in the ground. And so now I can go to a company like Microsoft or an individual, here in the United States and say, look, you're producing pollution. Let me help you pay for your pollution. So, so you pay us as PlantVillage Plus and we will take out the carbon. So as an average American you might produce 16 tons of carbon per year. Okay. Let's get you on to a membership plan whereby you're paying a monthly subscription. We're removing the carbon but also helping you reduce the emissions overall.
So Penn State's a leader in climate change. We have people like Bruce Logan here who are really good at factoring in how much carbon we all produce. So I would like to see you over the next ten years, go from 16 tons a year down to say, ten. And so I want you to pay for your pollution, but I also want you to reduce beyond a, you know, ten-year plan.
So that's how we see these aspects. We have climate change adaptation: help the farmers grow more food, and climate change mitigation: so with the non-consumed biomass turn that into coal, put that coal under the ground. And have you as a citizen in this country pay for your pollution, because that's what you do with your garbage. You don't just throw it out in the street. We don't allow that. You pay your taxes, somebody comes and picks it up and takes it away for you.
Host
What are some of the next steps for PlantVillage? Maybe things that you're excited about or maybe even challenges that you're foreseeing?
David Hughes
Yeah, I think it's very funny to be at this position where I'm really, really thinking about business. I think we've had a great run with the public sector. We raised a lot of money, over $41 million from our initial $120,000 investment. But the more we've gotten involved with this, the more we see it's a billion-dollar problem.
So what I would like to see is a company set up here in Happy Valley, which is PlantVillage Plus, on the doorstep of Penn State. So it's PlantVillage Plus, a company, developing solutions for a climate change world with a $1.29 billion R&D department called Penn State. So if we are trying to grow food under this climate, we can just go across the road to Penn State, to various researchers and say, hey, let's work on this solution. Let's pay you as a university lab to do this. Have your PhD students publish their research. It's available. It's nonproprietary. But then we as PlantVillage Plus come and scale it out. And actually we've been doing this with another company called MAA'VA that I'm an advisor on. And so they've been working with Behrend for plastics and also a lab here, on concrete.
So I think there's really great opportunities to work on the doorstep of land-grant universities. I think that's great for our University because the University gets royalties on this effort. And I think it's great for any company trying to deal with climate change.
So this is the hottest summer in 125,000 years. It'll be the coldest summer for the rest of your life. And we invented agriculture 12,000 years ago. So there is no institution in the world who knows how to grow food under this climate. So everything going forward will demand open, transparent science that is constantly updating prior beliefs. The best organizations in the world to do that are the U.S. land-grants. That's what we did in the 1870s as we expanded the production of agriculture in the face of things like the locust crisis out west that you've read on Little House on the Prairie, that was that was prevented by USDA in the land-grants, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, adaptive research.
So we really need a land-grant mentality and model to help us grow food in a climate-change world. But we also need a private sector to scale that out. So this is what I think we can do. And that's what I'm really excited about over the next ten years, building a combination of Happy Valley and Silicon Valley here in State College, where we can bring together the land-grant model with the scalable AI cloud solutions that we've adopted from Google.
Host
You said, you know, you're so surprised, the way you are, thinking about so much about business. Is it still okay? Is it rewarding? Is it like, yeah, that's okay, I'm going in this direction. I mean, it's... you've diverged pretty far, I think, I mean, it seems like you've diverged pretty far from your original career.
David Hughes
Well, I've diverged enormously from my original career. So I came here to Penn State to work on zombie ants, so I worked on fungi to manipulate ant behavior in rainforests. And I unfortunately have had to give that all up because I couldn't do both at once. And I felt that under climate change, everything else except working on climate change is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. So if I'm in, I should be all in.
So having focused on working on climate change in the context of PlantVillage, it's become apparent that I, the obvious one is to go to billions, if not trillions, of dollars. And so since the only way to do that is through the commercial sector with Penn State as a partner, that's the direction I'm going.
I feel that if I continue on this pathway of just public funds, we will have done some stuff, but it won't be enough. I don't think we've fully internalized the remark I've made before, which is that it's the coldest summer for the rest of your life. So I think I think that's going to become more apparent as we head towards 2030, just how difficult this is. So, so I think, yeah, I have to be all in on this. So yeah, it is a bit of a change, but I think it's a necessary one.
Host
Could you talk a little bit about how the early support from IEE helped in the success of this project?
David Hughes
We've had tremendous support from a variety of different parts of the University, from the Huck, from IEE, from the provost office. And I think so many of those things gave us the freedom to make mistakes. And we were able to explore a variety of different components.
The fundamental message hasn't changed. Take the supercomputer that is a smartphone and enable a land-grant in a phone. But the funding that we had allowed us to try out computer vision models, we tried out also with IEE funding, some of the early work on large language models, which predated ChatGPT.
So I think that was just great and successful because that's the beauty of this kind of investment. It allows you to figure out what does and does not work. Like Edison, you know, "I know 10,000 ways it doesn't work until you find the light bulb." And I think the benefit of public funding and the support that comes from IEE or the Huck or elsewhere, it's just indescribable. As opposed to trying to go out into the private sector and having some VC choke you on a daily basis for exorbitant returns on your investment.
Host
Was there anything that was surprising during this time, and now, granted, you're thinking back 12 years, over your period of time working on this project, anything surprising that really stands out to you in the history of this project?
David Hughes
That there was a lot of resistance. But then I guess in hindsight, it wasn't surprising, but initially I was always so upset that members of the University would ask me not to do this or FAO and other organizations would say, hey, this is not the way it should be done. And so I think that's a little bit like Blockbuster and Netflix.
Of course, you know, Blockbuster would say Netflix is not the ideal way to watch a video. It's better to walk out into the rain, you know, go to a video shop and take a piece of plastic, bring it back and stick it in the machine. But of course, sitting on your sofa is a better way to watch a movie. You just download it.
So, the incumbents always had this idea about disruption, but I'm really glad now that the University has really leaned into what we're doing. I'm really happy. I think for some people it was a little bit of a novel concept and unusual. But overall, I think this University is going in some pretty spectacular and interesting directions. I'm really happy by the leadership, particularly under Andrew Read. And so that's nice to see that.
And I think, again, I keep on going back to the land-grant model. The world is in a terrible place in terms of climate change and food. And the question is, is if not us to solve it, then who? It's not going to be Google. It's not going to be Apple. It's not going to be governments. So it has to be research-based science that updates prior beliefs on a daily basis. It's what we've done historically, and it's what we can do into the future.
Host
If you had 20s with a world leader and you had to really pitch this to a world leader in some way, shape or form, what's your elevator pitch for PlantVillage?
David Hughes
When Kennedy decided to go to the moon, he understood the importance of people who knew aerodynamics and rocket science. If we are trying to feed 10 billion people on a 2.6-degree Celsius hotter world, we need domain expertise. We need to bring in experts. It's what has saved us through the Dust Bowl, and it's what's going to save us into the future.
So don't underestimate the importance of expertise. And the land-grant University of the United States is a key exemplar of that.
Host
Very well put. Thank you. David Hughes, thank you so much for taking time and talking with us. And thank you so much for your investment and being all-in because not everyone does that. So, I appreciate your time. Do you have any final words or even contact information or anything that... “Hey, you want to be a part of this,” or... I'll give you the floor.
David Hughes
It's in the name PlantVillage. Come join us: plantvillage.psu.edu: PlantVillage at Penn State. That's who we are. We're very keen for people to help us in any way you think. And really, it is. It is this village model. It is the greatest challenge we face. But I think that I'm sort of betting on humans to succeed here, especially because the alternative is not so agreeable.
But I very much appreciate IEE and the University for all its support and I'm really excited, despite the challenges we have, I'm really excited that we can actually solve this and very, very optimistic for the future. So yeah, happy to talk to anybody who wants to reach out.
Host
This has been season five, episode three of Growing Impact. Thanks again to David Hughes for speaking with me about PlantVillage. To watch a video version of this episode and to learn more about the research team, visit iee.psu.edu/podcast. Once you're there, you'll find previous episodes, transcripts, related graphics, and so much more. Our creative director is Chris Komlenic, with graphic design and video production by Brenna Buck, marketing and social media by Tori Indivero and web support by John Stabinger.
Join us again next month as we continue our exploration of Penn State research and its growing impact. Thanks for listening.
