Freeing agriculture from climate slavery

The future of food is taking shape in an IT laboratory in Boston.

red and blueberries

A computer lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is not an obvious place to grow fruit and vegetables. But this is where a team of programmers-turned-farmers is trying to do just that, with the help of big data, in a project which could revolutionise agriculture.

The MIT’s Open Agriculture (OpenAg) Initiative aims to find out what makes up the ideal environment for growing fruit, vegetables and other plants. Based on its analysis of vast amounts of data collected from around the world, it is building an online platform which would help improve the quality of foodstuffs, make agriculture more sustainable and bring farming closer to consumers – especially those living in cities.

“We want to use climate as a tool and think about the earth as a catalogue of climates,” says Caleb Harper, director of OpenAg. “We believe that the data we are collecting will allow us to design climates and environments under laboratory conditions anywhere in the world – including in city warehouses – which can be used to grow fruit and vegetables while also improving its taste and nutritional quality.”

“At the centre of our work is democratising climate… Modern agriculture is a slave to climate, which dictates where plants are grown globally and creates the enormous international trade in foodstuffs.”

OpenAg’s data is publicly available on a crowd-sourced platform. Users can download digital “climate recipes.” These are computer scripts containing particular environmental conditions – water, temperature and light intensity, among other things – that have been coded by others. This allows users to replicate successful environmental conditions that optimise the growth of foodstuff anywhere in the world. They can also upload their own findings.

OpenAg’s 6 square-metre farm within the MIT’s MediaLab uses soil-less techniques such as aeroponics, where roots of plants such as broccoli and strawberries hang free in a mist of water, minerals and oxygen. They use less water and grow four to five times faster compared with soil-based methods. The farm can produce enough food to feed about 300 people once a month.

plant growth within a growing chamber

Fourth agricultural revolution  

Harper maintains such technology will change farming for good. Agriculture, he says, has so far witnessed three revolutions: the first involved the growing of food, which created societies; the second was mechanisation, which allowed cities to grow and be fed; and the third was biotech, which increased productivity as the global population soared.

Now, it is about to enter its fourth: climate democracy, or the process through which anyone living anywhere has the means to create a good climate to grow better and more nutritional food.

And he sees digitisation as the key to this.

“What if we could take an apple, digitise it somehow, send it through the air to somewhere close to the consumer and reconstitute it? It is not just about the genetics of plants, their genomes: it is about their phenomes – how they react to phenomena that affect their genomes, such as the stress imposed by weather, the soil and other environmental influences.”

What if we could take an apple, digitise it, send it to the consumer and reconstitute it ?
cotton in a field

Digitising agriculture is also going beyond fruit and vegetables. Cotton is another crop whose quality varies as climate and environment changes. OpenAg was approached for help by Indian cotton growers farming on land where the water tables were dropping, threatening the crop’s quality and consistency. After surveying the different cotton plants around the world, an Icelandic variety regarded as the best has now been used to create a new variety for India’s climate and environment.

Harper hopes that, by taking such an approach, the food industry can eventually be placed on a more sustainable footing. 

Food production, he maintains, has become an environmental problem partly because it is excessively centralised and thus disconnected from its consumers. Only 2 per cent of the US population work in the country's agriculture sector, he laments. 

If the OpenAg initiative succeeds in bringing agriculture into urban environments, it could create one billion more farmers. That, he says, will enable society produce more, better tasting and nutritious food. The planet can only benefit from that.