The agricultural system that feeds the world was built for a stable climate that no longer exists.

Extreme weather, degraded soils, and emerging pests are disrupting harvests within a single season—yet developing new crop varieties still takes 8–15 years.

Farmers face rapidly changing conditions while crop innovation remains stuck in decade-long cycles.

Agriculture sits at the center of food security, economic stability, and environmental resilience.
But the systems used to develop new crops were designed for slower, more predictable conditions than the world now faces.

• Global food demand is projected to increase by approximately 50% by 2050.
• Climate volatility is already causing 10–25% year-to-year yield variability in some regions.
• Developing new crop varieties typically requires 8–15 years and significant capital investment.
• Extreme weather events in 2024 alone caused more than $20 billion in crop and rangeland losses for U.S. farmers.
• Soil degradation and emerging pest pressures are forcing farmers to abandon previously reliable crop varieties.

Without dramatically faster crop innovation systems, agriculture risks falling permanently behind the pace of environmental change.

XPRIZE Adaptive Plants will catalyze high-velocity crop innovation systems that dramatically accelerate the path from biological insight to field-ready seed.
By compressing development timelines from decades to years, the prize aims to enable agriculture to continuously adapt to changing environmental conditions.

XPRIZE Adaptive Plants aims to transform agriculture from a system that reacts slowly to environmental change into one capable of continuous adaptation.

Expected outcomes include:

• Dramatically faster development of climate-adaptive crop varieties
• Greater resilience to drought, heat, flooding, salinity, and degraded soils
• Expanded innovation beyond a small number of global seed companies
• More locally adapted crop varieties for diverse agricultural regions
• Increased stability across global food and agricultural supply chains

We welcome innovators from around the world to compete.

We are particularly interested in teams working at the intersection of plant science, biotechnology, AI, automation, and agricultural systems—capable of dramatically accelerating how new crops are developed and validated.

Potential competitors may include:

• Agricultural biotechnology companies developing advanced breeding or gene-editing platforms
• University research teams advancing plant genomics, phenotyping, and crop improvement systems
• AI and machine learning teams building predictive breeding and trait design models
• Automation and robotics innovators accelerating plant testing and selection
• Interdisciplinary teams applying technologies from biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and advanced manufacturing to crop development

XPRIZE welcomes funding from individuals and corporate entities seeking to sponsor this initiative.

If you are interested, we encourage you to contact us and help play a part in innovating climate-adaptive crops for a rapidly changing world.