30  / SEEDWORLD.COM  SEPTEMBER 2026
By combining AI, 3D plant 
reconstruction and canopy 
modeling, researchers are 
helping breeders evaluate 
promising corn architectures 
long before extensive field 
testing begins. 
By Treena Hein, Seed World U.S. Contributor
Building 
Better Corn 
in Virtual 
Fields
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS 
rapidly becoming another powerful 
tool in the crop breeder's toolbox. It 
joins decades of advances that have 
steadily transformed how new varieties 
and hybrids are developed. Modern crop 
breeding emerged decades ago with large 
plots and wide-scale phenotype selection. 
Over the past 20 years, genome mapping, 
gene editing and other new tools have 
enabled unprecedented achievements. 
Now AI is in full swing in the seed sector.
AI specializes in crunching large 
amounts of data, but researchers can also 
be train it to extract data — for example, 
recognizing specific traits in thousands of 
crop images captured by terrestrial robots 

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