Why do we accept losing a fifth of the harvest?

We put land, water, energy, and months of work into growing food. Then we accept that a substantial part of it will be lost before anyone can eat it. A global assessment estimated that pests and pathogens take roughly a fifth of wheat and maize yields and nearly a third of rice yields. For a farmer, that means less food to bring home, less to sell, and less money for the next planting. We think the gap between what a field can grow and what is actually eaten is much wider than it needs to be and deserves a global scientific effort.¹

Production loss (pounds/year)

1.1 trillion

Avg calories lost per capita/day

766

Scientific advances have changed how much food we can grow. There is no reason to think we have reached the limit of what we can protect. In January 2025, 153 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates called for urgent investment in agricultural research to help feed a projected 9.7 billion people by 2050. Their warning was that the pace of progress would not meet future food needs. Protecting more of what we already grow has to be part of the answer.²

And the conditions keep changing. Research published in Science projects that insect-related losses of wheat, rice, and maize could increase by 10–25% for every degree Celsius of global warming. Those are increases in the losses themselves, on top of the damage farmers already face. Protecting more of the world’s food means understanding an insect in a growing environment that keeps changing.³

We’ve accepted that insects can eat or damage so much of our harvest. We’ve accepted a way of crop protection that still leaves a substantial part of what we grow unprotected. And, today, in our age of rapid gains in intelligence, we should be asking what a different approach could make possible. When an insect lands on a crop, it can begin feeding or laying eggs. What if we could change that decision?

That is the question behind Monarch’s crop work. It requires understanding what an insect senses, what makes a plant attractive, and which compounds can change its behavior. It requires machine learning, computer vision, chemical ecology, insect biology, and insect neuroscience. It requires experiments that tell us what happens when a living animal encounters something it has never encountered before. A model can learn from the experiments we have run. It cannot give us reliable answers about every compound, insect, and growing condition we have yet to test.

The bottleneck is behavioral data: observations of what insects actually do, collected in ways that let one experiment build on another. More labs testing compounds. More recordings that can be compared. More sharing of what works, what fails, and under which conditions. Increasingly capable predictive models can then help us decide what to test next, and each new experiment can make those models more useful.

To accelerate the answer means organizing around a shared scientific problem. A Human Genome Project-like effort, with researchers contributing different expertise to a common body of knowledge. Shared methods that make results useful beyond the lab that produced them. Rapid exchange that allows the next experiment to begin with more knowledge than the last. And a clear expectation that promising results must hold up in the field and become something a farmer can use.

We think changing an insect’s decision to land could help close a gap we have accepted for too long. The work will be technically difficult. Its value will be measured in more of the harvest reaching people. That is the outcome we want a community of researchers pointed toward, with the same intention, with the same mission.

• Apply to join crop research at Monarch
• Read the lab and field protocols

1. 1Serge Savary et al., “The global burden of pathogens and pests on major food crops,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 3 (2019): 430–439. nature.com
2. 2World Food Prize Foundation, Laureates’ call for urgent investment in agricultural research, January 2025. worldfoodprize.org
3. 3Curtis A. Deutsch et al., “Increase in crop losses to insect pests in a warming climate,” Science 361, no. 6405 (2018): 916–919. Read the study