For years, Prof. Matan Gavish has taught the Hebrew University’s largest course on artificial intelligence (AI), taken by hundreds of students annually. There had to be something big and meaningful AI could do for the future of humanity, he felt. His attention turned to sustainable farming and precision agriculture. “Everyone wants to work in Silicon Valley,” he reflects. “But wheat and corn could be much more important, in the grand scheme of things.”
The natural direction to turn was the Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and Environment. “Hebrew University is a powerhouse in both AI and agriculture,” says Prof. Gavish. “It makes perfect sense to combine these two fields and develop ways to feed future generations—doing more with less.” He connected with two plant scientists: Prof. Menachem Moshelion, an expert in plant physiology, and Dr. Ittai Herrmann, an expert in plant remote sensing.
“We built ISURF the Israeli way: with a little bit of chutzpa, a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, and an ambitious technological vision stretching the limit of knowledge and budget.”
A project was started in Singapore, a tiny island city-state similar Israel: it is small, lacking in natural resources, and has an innovation-based economy. But unlike Israel, Singapore imports nearly its entire food supply, and has very little agricultural land. This is cause for concern in the face of possible food shortages in the coming decades. To meet this challenge, Singapore is investing significantly in aquaculture, urban agriculture, and alternative proteins – with the goal of producing 30% of their food by 2030.
The Singaporean research authority CREATE developed strategic partnerships with select institutions worldwide, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A joint Israel-Singapore team with colleagues in both countries–Hebrew University in Israel and NTU in Singapore–applied for a highly competitive research grant from CREATE. “It was a Hail Mary,” says Prof. Gavish. “To the best of our knowledge, nothing like our proposed research facility existed anywhere in the world.”
the team is now building Israel-Singapore URban Farm (ISURF), a research facility in Singapore that conducts experiments in real-world tropical urban farm conditions, monitoring and measuring the crops as they grow in the Singaporean climate. “This is very exciting”, says Prof. Gavish. The cutting edge experiments we will run in ISURF could be very meaningful for tropical urban food production.
