The cooperation achieved in the Phenomics Consortium would seem especially difficult to achieve. After all, what is the point of assembling together people from technology and defense corporations, agriculture companies and academic institutions? And what common language can high-tech professionals hope to find with farmers not to mention academics?
Yet, more than a year after launching Phenomics, no-one doubts the common vision any longer.
In order to understand the full picture, let's take a step back and learn a bit about this specific field – precision agriculture. Precision agriculture is an approach to agricultural management based on observation and precise scientific measurement of plants in agricultural growing conditions and, according to the results, providing a precise response of focused treatment.
Sharone Aloni, Senior Director of Sensing Systems at Elbit Systems, explains why the field of precision agriculture is presently at a critical point: "There is a global food crisis today that will only worsen with time. The field of improving ability to produce agricultural crops is therefore of great importance. Governments and broad-based organizations such as the UN devote significant attention to these areas.
"The State of Israel", he says, "can introduce many of its capabilities in this specific field as well as the immense knowledge that we possess in agriculture and sensors – things that Israel is renowned for worldwide. These are all reflected in the Phenomics consortium."
Today's global bottleneck in plant improvement and in research of food enhancement is in the area of phenotyping – the ability to perform a computerized identification and processing of data on the morphological and physiological traits of plants.
Dr. Hagai Karchi from Evogene, one of the company's founders and chairman of the Phenomics consortium explains: "The current ability to measure plant traits (phenotypes) is at the level of 19th century medicine. This is still a profession that is transmitted from one expert to the next as an art rather than as an exact science. Plant breeders for example, are learning to look at plants, understand their state and how to improve them."