Gadgetory

as Americans the way we eat is not sustainable for much longer the farming which supports our bad habits is inherently flawed an estimated one hundred sixty five billion dollars are lost to wasted food every year and the scarcity of water threatens to wipe out production in parts of the country also threatening the balance of global food systems but could technology be the answer an MIT scientist is giving farming a facelift by building a platform for the next generation of food an operating system for the farm in the future about four years ago during Japan's tsunami a group from the Media Lab went to Minami Sanriku we were looking at all different kinds of things I was looking at food the headlines that day said Japan farming has no youth no water no future and so from that point I started thinking about contaminated areas and how could we put it back into production you know the strategy right now is these countries that are having food security issues go to another country and they buy their land and they make a farm the problem with colonizing another place for food is often that place also doesn't have much food you know it's not a far stretch that when supply lines get stressed more when our natural resources get stressed more you will see you know a potential war over food you'd have to protect it and militarize it and all these things which i think is an awful way for the world to go but if those countries start investing in their cities which is where everybody's going to live anyway you know that's the biggest change that I see happening for the relationship between you know this kind of Agriculture and conventional agriculture I'm Caleb Harper I'm a research scientist I'm also the founder of the city farm project which is just looking at you know how do we feed our cities of the future how do we move production closer to the point of consumption city farm is a plant research facility based in MIT Media Lab using state-of-the-art equipment they explore and build innovative and high-performance indoor agriculture systems the research and development of hydroponic or aquatic production the lab uses an array of network sensors and computerized automation to deliver the most efficient means of growing plants without the need for soil when I look in at my lab what do I see I see a 1960s mainframe I see vacuum tubes and plugs all over the place in one crazy maniacal man that goes back and forth filling holes in the dam I mean that's what I feel like and that's what I see and that is to me the most accurate representation of the technology we're at the beginning we are not the first by far but right now we're at the special moment where everybody cares because people are now asking for a level of transparency but they haven't asked for before so that's why I'm making my work completely transparent to say look come check it out I'm gonna try to get one in your city I'm gonna try to get one around your kids for them to play with it and see what everybody thinks and so they can kind of educate through doing and then decide what they think of the food because we have to educate people we have to bring people into this new method of growing we have to create innovators it's no longer the case that you know grow it there and eat it here let's grow it here eat it here as you enter the space you'll encounter what we think of as like a decontamination area that's where we keep our server and our tools then you go into the next big volume and what you'll have is all the different kinds of equipment that we have in there so there's aeroponic systems and then there's shallow water culture shallow water culture is just like two inches of water the plant stood and then there's deep water culture for bigger plants aeroponics is just where there's no longer standing water we're just misting it we're misting at about 50 microns a size so a little heavier than fog so it's just water and how we're using water and are we using it the most effectively for the plants this is called a shallow water culture so three inches of water these nice bright white roots that come out so what we're doing with this is continually recirculating this water around in the system what you're seeing growing here is a variety of things so in the lab we do a poly cropped environment which just means we try to grow a lot of different kinds of things rather than a mono we have 12 points of sensing so things like pH in the water makes a big difference electrical conductivity so the amount of salts in the water co2 content temperature humidity we control the photosynthetically active radiation levels so that's just is a big fancy word for the part of light that grows plants which is about 10% of light it falls between like red and blue so we monitor and adjust that for both spectral balance and intensity so I mean there's a lot of control and understanding going on in there and so when we have a problem you know for a specific plant we can kind of go back to the data we've collected and change the environment what I'm working on and what a lot of people are working on needs to be thought of in concert with agriculture rather than us versus them this is not a replacement what's really going to happen is it's going to be implemented in strategic ways you know because on one side of the spectrum you have people that just love this they're like you know it tastes better it's fresher it's better for you you have the other side that's like this is freaky food this is super freaky food and what did you do with it because I as a consumer feel like I've been lied to for a long time about my food and I don't believe you I think that's a conversation that from my perspective just needs to be open and say look you want to know what's going on with the water here it is open data right for you check it out you want to be invested in your food again I will hopefully be building sockets for you to plug into to where you can be reinvested in your food again and understand what's going on there's a new farmer being born and the new farmer lives in the city and is young you know this is a new generation of people that can get interested in food in a different way and there's existing farmers whose systems we can make better