Are "Food Computers" the key to a more sustainable future of agriculture?

2016-05-11T14:00:00-04:00

That an apple can travel over 11,500 miles from where it was grown (spending over a year in shipment and in toxic, low-oxygen storage to suspend its maturation) is the perfect object lesson of our global agricultural system’s failures. [...] And with the advent of natural-resource scarcity, flattening yields, loss of biodiversity, changing climates, environmental degradation, and booming urban populations, we’re hurtling toward its natural limit.

"What if we could build a different world? One in which anyone could farm anywhere, not just on land devastated by disaster, but in basements, skyscrapers, and abandoned subway tunnels? Or in classrooms, rooftops, and old factories?"

In this article by Caleb Harper, the Director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at MIT, he criticizes the "snarled cats-cradle of crisscrossed strings between origin and destination, shipment and storage" that constitutes today's global agricultural system.

At the Open AG Initiative, they're experimenting with hi-tech but low-impact ways to produce food, such as the “Food Computer,” a "controlled environment agriculture platform." The platform utilizes robotic control systems and plant-sensing mechanisms to produce a "precisely calibrated environment for growth."

By utilizing thirty sensing points per plant, the group believes they're creating more of a dialogue with biological systems than the dominating tendencies of conventional architecture.

The Open ...

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Are "Food Computers" the key to a more sustainable future of agriculture?