CityReads│This Computer Will Grow Your Food?
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This Computer Will
Grow Your Food?
Get to know Caleb Harper's "food computers" and catch a glimpse of what the future of farming might look like.
Caleb Harper, This computer will grow your food in the future,TED Talk, December 2015 at TEDGlobal>Geneva
https://www.ted.com/talks/caleb_harper_this_computer_will_grow_your_food_in_the_future/transcript?language=en#t-161806
Picture source: http://openag.media.mit.edu/
The 10,000 years of its history, advancements in agriculture have enabled three society-altering revolutions. From the domestication of plants and the resulting first human settlements in 8,000 BC, to the horse and plow and the rise of technology-based societies in 600 AD, and finally to the vertical integration of farming brought on by the mechanization, chemical fertilization, and biotechnology of today, agricultural revolution has always been the driving force behind humanity’s societal progress.
The current industrialized food system feeds 7.2 billion people, of which more than 50% live in cities and only 3% are involved in the production of their own food.
We are still a slave to climate. This is a map of climate in the world. The most productive areas are in green, the least productive are in red.
But the future of agriculture seems bleak. Japanese farming has no youth, no water, no land and no future. The land in Fukushima is contaminated. Kids are headed to Sendai and Tokyo, and they import 70 percent of their own food. But that is not unique to Japan, 50 percent of the African population is under 18. Eighty percent don't want to be farmers. The life of a small-shareholder farmer is miserable. The youth tend to go into the city. In India, farmers' families not being able to have basic access to utilities, more farmer suicides this year than the previous 10 years combined.
With natural resource scarcity, flattening yields, loss of biodiversity, changing climate, and booming urban populations, our current food system is rapidly approaching its natural limit.
The problem is, we need more food and we need it cheap.
What will define the fourth agricultural revolution and how will it impact global societies?
What if ... we built a digital farm? A digital world farm. What if you could take this apple, digitize it somehow, send it through particles in the air and reconstitute it on the other side? What if we could grow delicious, nutrient-dense food, indoors anywhere in the world? Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, wants to change the food system by connecting growers with technology. Get to know Harper's "food computers" and catch a glimpse of what the future of farming might look like.
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The Open Agriculture Initiative and the Food Computer
The MIT Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAG) was founded in 2015 by Caleb Harper as an initiative of the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. OpenAG stemmed from the MIT CityFARM project. The project aims to develop controlled-environment agriculture platforms called "Food Computers" that operate on a variety of scales.
The Food Computer is a controlled-environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate, energy, and plant growth inside of a specialized growing chamber. Climate variables such as carbon dioxide, air temperature, humidity, dissolved oxygen, potential hydrogen, electrical conductivity, and root-zone temperature are among the many conditions that can be controlled and monitored within the growing chamber. Operational energy, water, and mineral consumption are monitored (and adjusted) through electrical meters, flow sensors, and controllable chemical dosers throughout the growth period.
Each specific set of conditions can be thought of as a climate recipe, and each recipe produces unique results in the phenotypes of the plants. Plants grown under different conditions may vary in color, size, texture growth rate, yield, flavor, and nutrient density.
Food Computers can be made in a variety of sizes, for production and experimentation on a wide range of scales.
Personal Food Computer – this tabletop-sized unit will draw makers, hobbyists, and schools that are interested in learning and teaching about food production. These small-scale environments are great for experimentation and for learning about biology, botany, environment, programming, engineering, and more.
Food Server – the size of a standard shipping container, these mid-sized units will appeal to interdisciplinary researchers and small-scale cafeterias, restaurants, and boutique operators. They will allow small scale producers to grown on-site and offer some of the freshest food options possible.
Food Datacenter – while still in the development phase, we hope to expand our technology to control the environments within warehouse sized units capable of industrial production. These units will likely be subdivided in order to grow many different types of crops, all under their ideal growing conditions.
In the Media Lab of MIT, Caleb and his team produced enough food to feed about 300 people once a month inside of these 60 square feet. Every plant is traced by about 30 points of sensing and the phenome is controlled by a computer. When someone mentioned the strawberries from Mexico, he means the phenomena that the strawberries produced in. So if the climate is coded into how much C02, how much 02 which creates a recipe, people will get the expression of that plant - the nutrition of that plant, the size of that plant, the shape, the color – all will be controlled by data.
So the sensors in the lab are just like the fortune-telling eyes developed by farmers, telling the needs of the plants it's a nitrogen deficiency, a calcium deficiency or it needs more humidity.
All the broccoli in Caleb’s lab are with IP address. By clicking the profile of a plant, people can get all about it: When does it achieve the nutrition that needed? When does it achieve the taste that desired? It alerts when it is getting too much water or too much sun. This seems like that the plants can express in a language that people use.
Caleb’s lab is experimenting with all kinds of ways and tools. The aeroponics process, developed by NASA for Mir Space Station, can reduce the amount of water. What it really does is give the plant exactly what it wants: water, minerals and oxygen. Roots are not that complicated, so it grows four or five times faster. Besides, they are also exploring things for adverse environment. A kind of rare and ancient tomato seeds which have germplasm alive were grown.
However, the cultivation tool is expensive. Caleb and his mechanical engineering undergraduate student, Camille, with the team iterated to make it cheaper and works better so other people can make it. Then they tried that in schools and called those food computers. They created an interface which likes a game. People can log into it anywhere in the world on their smartphone, on their tablet.
With the process of growing, the data collects by the sensors change. This can be improved, explored and shared, also creating a new digital recipe. Caleb and his team have open-sourced all of that online, so people can try to build their first food computer at home.
At present, they are starting a new facility. They have already made it exist that some plants are producing the protein that Ebola resistant. So pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, but not only food will be used in the the future.
People are asking for more, cheaper food, for better, environmentally friendly food. Personal food computers, food servers and food data centers could change the food network, which run on the open phenome like Wikipedia.Everyone can pull down, actuate and grow. Everyone could be the farmer.
We start sending information about food, rather than sending food. Food computers, food servers, soon-to-be food data centers, connecting people together to share information. So the platform connects people together sharing food information, questioning and answering more possibilities about the future.
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