I’m pretty sure we take seeds for granted. They are right under our noses, everywhere we turn. From corn, wheat, and cotton to barley and flowers, seeds are the foundation of everything we eat and wear. Seeds become fibres and fabrics to make our clothes, towels, sheets, hats, flags, and so on—they can even be turned into bio-jet fuel.

Here’s a fantastic fact about Ethiopian mustard seeds for the week: the seed produces less black carbon exhaust than fossil fuel with a higher flash point, which makes it safer to use on Navy ships. Less black carbon equals a cleaner environment.

Rethinking commodities

A very long time ago, way back in 50 BC, salt was used to pay Roman soldiers and was considered white gold because it preserved meat and fish.

Commodities are just the raw materials needed to create many of the products we buy and eat. They range from agricultural products to energy products like oil and natural gas.

There’s no doubt about it - corn, sorghum, barley—are seeds that are commodities. But what if we considered the tomato seed a commodity and traded it like corn? How would this change how food is grown or how resources are used to grow our food? Or even how we thought about the value of seeds in our lives?

The US Department of Agriculture considers seeds and seedlings of agricultural and horticultural plants to be agricultural or horticultural commodities. So we could say tomato seeds ARE a commodity, but they definitely aren’t treated like one.

Tomatoes are the world's most produced fruit. The global tomato seed market is expected to grow from $1.19 billion in 2023 to $1.85 billion in six years by 2030. The growth rate of tomato seeds is due to several factors, including the health of the soil, pest control, and water scarcity.  And those climate factors right now are being pushed to the hottest and driest in the countries that grow the bulk of our food globally.

The tomato seed feedback loop.

There really isn’t one. Seed companies have little idea of what happens with the seeds they sell to growers and how productive each seed is on a farm in Mexico versus a farm in Florida versus Morocco.  Why does one variety perform better than another year on year or worse year on year? Where is the aggregated data from each grower from year to year? Tomato Seed A did great, but next year, it’s predicted to be 5% warmer in the same area with less rain, so what will happen to that seed in that harsher environment? Or five years in the future?

No one really knows. Seed producers don’t have the data, not really. They want to believe they know, but how can they? It takes seven to ten years to develop a new seed—a decade. Can you see what the next decade will look like in soil composition? Water availability? It’s educated assumptions.

And, if the intelligent scientists who study soil and water are estimating what soil composition will be like for crops, how can a seed producer who doesn’t know how their seeds perform develop a new seed a decade from now that will grow in that different environment?

We are perpetually behind.

The hard pill to swallow is that mature crops—corn, wheat, barley, sorghum—have become commodities. They are traded on and against—they make up the futures market. But not a futures market a decade in the future. A 10-13 years in the future futures market that says you will need a different seed NOW if you want those crops to grow in a decade from now.

That’s a futures market.

If you have enough customers and data, you could inform a new tradeable commodity—say, tomato seeds. We could begin to trade in tomatoes or blueberries—a horticultural commodity.

But if you have to wait seven to ten years to create a new plant, then it will be too late. The environment you created for that tomato plant to grow in will not exist.

Data + digital twins

Technology can help us prepare for that future, futures market. It would typically take four to six months to understand the outcome of the growth of a tomato seed-to-plant trial in a controlled growth environment.

With data and AI, you could accelerate that process to four to six seconds and factor in varying degrees of water, soil, pests and heat data from actual growers around the world. This data is precisely what a seed producer needs to create that future tomato seed. This not only saves the seed company money but in a very similar approach to pharmaceutical trials for new drug therapies.

This approach could help shape new varieties of seeds that can have higher yields in harsher growing conditions. WayBeyond is already doing this with the billions of data points and more than the 1,600 crop cycles we have gathered on tomato groups globally.

I know that if we were to transform tomato seeds into a real future, futures commodity, we could use both data and AI to shorten the cycle of growing food for the benefit of humanity.