Google says AI can help Indian farmers deal with climate change better

Google is partnering with Hyderabad-based ICRISAT and a few other organisations around the world to bring AI to farming. The tech giant hopes AI-led research will help Indian farmers deal with climate change better.Google wants to help Indian farmers with AI.New Delhi,Oct 16, 2026 10:57 ISTDifferent tech companies are using AI in different ways. But among all the big tech companies, Google so far is the one that is pushing for AI not just in offices or for creating images and videos, but also as a technology that can transform some fundamental parts of the society, from medical sciences to farming. On Thursday Google announced some fresh initiatives that will see the company, working with some partners, explore how best AI can be used in farming to make crops more resilient to climate change.The company said it was entering into a partnership with Hyderabad-headquartered International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and the Department of Genome Sciences at University of Washington to “accelerate the development of globally essential multi-purpose crops” that would help “farmers adapt and build resilience, especially in vulnerable dryland areas.”In particular, the initiatives will be led by Google DeepMind, the AI research arm of the company, and Google.org, the division that deals in non-profit work. To start with, Google hopes to focus research on “climate-resilient nutrient-rich crops like sorghum, also known as jowar” with an aim to build “a genetic atlas that will include indigenous collections of sorghum varieties to support a range of use cases – from nutritious cereal, to animal fodder, biofuel and more.”Google India country manager Preeti Lobana and DeepMind chief AI readiness officer Lila Ibrahim wrote in a blog post: “This work aligns with India’s national focus on millets as a pillar of agricultural resilience, turning local research into a blueprint for global food security.” As part of the initiative, Google will also “support a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at ICRISAT — its first fellowship in India and first outside the UK — to help build tools that can similarly characterise genomes for other critical crops like pulses, including chickpea, groundnut, and pigeon peas (arhar, tuar dal).”The Google and ICRISAT partnership comes at a time when the tech giant already has a few other AI-driven initiatives going on in India. The company in recent months, through its AnthroKrishi programme, has provided AI-driven “agri model APIs (for) Gujarat’s Krushi Pragati crop intelligence platform, supporting over 900 million SMS-based advisories for over 600,000 farmers across the state.”At the same time, it continues with its Google AI Educator Series in India. It was launched in May and since then the programme has introduced AI tools and knowhow to over 80,000 educators. In addition, the company says, “as part of our commitment to supporting India's national AI roadmap, Google.org is providing $15 million in funding to The Nudge to accelerate the growth of the country’s MSMEs.”- Ends