This computer will grow your food in the future

Food crisis. It’s in the news every day. But what is it? In some places in the world, it’s too little food. Maybe too much. In other places, GMO is saving the world. Maybe GMO is the problem. There is too much agricultural runoff creating bad oceans, toxic oceans, and attenuation of nutrition. People go on and on, and I find the current climate of this discussion incredibly disempowering.

So how do we bring that to something that we understand? How is this apple part of the food crisis? You’ve all eaten an apple in the last week, I’m sure. How old do you think it was from when it was picked? Two weeks, two months, eleven months? The average age of an apple in a grocery store in the United States is eleven months, and I don’t expect it to be much different in Europe or anywhere else in the world.

We pick them, we put them in cold storage, and we gas the cold storage. There’s documented proof of workers trying to go into these environments to retrieve an apple and dying because the atmosphere that slows down the process of the apple is also toxic to humans. How is it that none of you know this? Why didn’t I know this?

Ninety percent of the quality of that apple, all the antioxidants, are gone by the time we get it. It’s basically a little ball of sugar. How did we get so information poor, and how can we do better? I think what’s missing is a platform. I know platforms. I know computers. They put me on the Internet when I was young. I did very weird things on this platform, but I met people and I could express myself.

How do you express yourself in food? If we had a platform, we might feel empowered to question, what if? For me, I question, what if climate was democratic? This is a map of climate in the world, the most productive areas in green and the least productive in red. They shift and they change. Californian farmers now become Mexican farmers. China picks up land in Brazil to grow better food, and we are slaves to climate.

What if each country had its own productive climate? What would that change about how we live? What would that change about quality of life and nutrition? The last generation’s problem was that we needed more food, and we needed it cheap. Welcome to your global farm. We built a huge analog farm. All these traces are cars, planes, trains, and automobiles. It’s a miracle that we feed seven billion people with just a few of us involved in the production of food.

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? Some quotes inspire me to do what I do. First, Japanese farming has no youth, no water, no land, and no future. That’s what I learned on the day that I went to Minami Sanriku, one stop south of Fukushima after the disaster.

The kids have headed to Tokyo. The land is contaminated. They already import seventy percent of their own food, but it’s not unique to Japan. Two percent of the American population is involved in farming. What good answer comes from two percent of any population? As we go around the world, fifty percent of the African population is under eighteen, and eighty percent don’t want to be farmers.

Farming is hard. The life of a small shareholder farmer is miserable. They go into the city. In India, farmers’ families don’t have basic access to utilities. There have been more farmer suicides this year than in the previous ten before that. It’s uncomfortable to talk about. Where are they going? Into the city. No young people, and everyone’s headed in. So how do we build this platform that inspires the youth?

Welcome to the new tractor. This is my combine. A number of years ago, I went to Bed Bath & Beyond and Home Depot, and I started hacking. I built silly things. I made plants dance. I attached them to my computer, and I killed them all a lot. Eventually, I got them to survive, and I created one of the most intimate relationships I’ve ever had in my life because I was learning the language of plants.

I wanted to make it bigger. They said, “Knock yourself out, kid. Here’s an old electronics room that nobody wants. What can you do?” With my team, we built a farm inside of the Media Lab, a place historically known not for anything about biology, but for everything about digital life. Inside of this sixty square feet, we produce enough food to feed about three hundred people once a month.

It’s not a lot of food, and there’s a lot of interesting technology in there. But the most interesting things are the beautiful white roots, deep green colors, and a monthly harvest. Is this a new cafeteria? Is this a new retail experience? Is this a new grocery store? I can tell you one thing for sure. This is the first time anybody in the Media Lab ripped the roots off of anything.

We get our salad in bags. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what happens when you have an image-based processing expert, a data scientist, and a roboticist ripping roots off and thinking, “Huh, I know something about this. I could make this happen. I want to try.” In that process, we would bring the plants out and then we would take some back to the lab, because if you grow it, you don’t throw it away. It’s precious to you.

I have this weird tongue now because I’m afraid to let anybody eat anything until I’ve eaten it first, because I want it to be good. So I eat lettuce every day, and I can tell the pH of a lettuce within 0.1. I’m like, “No, that’s 6.1. No, you can’t eat it today.” This lettuce that day was hyper sweet. It was hyper sweet because the plant had been stressed and it created a chemical reaction in the plant to protect itself.

I’m not going to die, and the plant’s not going to die. It tastes sweet to me. Technologists are falling backwards into plant physiology. We thought other people needed to be able to try this. We want to see what people can create. So we conceived of a lab that could be shipped anywhere, and then we built it.

On the facade of the Media Lab is my lab that has about thirty points of sensing per plant. If you know about the genome or genetics, this is the phenome, the phenomena. When you say, “I like the strawberries from Mexico,” you really like the strawberries from the climate that produced the expression that you like. If you’re coding climate—this much CO2, this much O2—it creates a recipe.

You’re coding the expression of that plant, the nutrition of that plant, the size of that plant, the shape, the color, and the texture. We need data, so we put a bunch of sensors in there to tell us what’s going on. If you think of your houseplants and you look at your houseplant, you’re super sad because you’re like, “Why are you dying? Won’t you talk to me?”

Farmers develop the most beautiful, foretelling eyes by the time they’re in their late sixties and seventies. They can tell you when they see that plant dying that it’s a nitrogen deficiency, a calcium deficiency, or that it needs more humidity. Those beautiful eyes are not being passed down. These are eyes in the cloud of a farmer.

We trend those data points over time. We correlate those data points to individual plants. These are all the broccoli in my lab that day by IP address. We have IP-addressable broccoli. If that’s not weird enough, you can click one and you get a plant profile. What this tells you is downloadable progress on that plant, but not like you’d think.

It’s not just about when it’s ready. It’s about when it achieves the nutrition that you need and when it achieves the taste that you desire. Is it getting too much water? Is it getting too much sun? You get alerts. It can talk to you. It’s conversant. We have a language. I think of that as the first user on the plant Facebook. That’s a plant profile.

When that plant starts making friends, it will make friends with other plants that use less nitrogen, more phosphorus, or less potassium. We are going to learn about a complexity that we can only guess at now. They may not friend us back. They might friend us back. It depends on how we act.

This is my lab now. It’s a little bit more systematized. My background is designing data centers and hospitals, so I know a little bit about creating a controlled environment. Inside of this environment, we’re experimenting with all kinds of things. The aeroponics process was developed by NASA for the space station to reduce the amount of water they send into space.

What it really does is give the plant exactly what it wants: water, minerals, and oxygen. Roots are not that complicated. When you give them that, you get this amazing expression. It’s like the plant has two hearts, and because it has two hearts, it grows four or five times faster. It’s a perfect world.

We’ve gone a long way into technology and seed for an adverse world, and we’re going to continue to do that. But we’re going to have a new tool too, which is the perfect world. We’ve grown all kinds of things. These tomatoes hadn’t been in commercial production for 150 years.

We have rare and ancient seed banks, banks of seed. They have germ plasm alive and things that you’ve never eaten. I’m the only person in this room who’s eaten that kind of tomato. The problem is it was a sauce tomato and we don’t know how to cook, so we just ate a sauce tomato, which is not that great. We’ve done things with protein. We’ve grown all kinds of things.

We haven’t grown humans, but maybe you could. What we realized is that the tool was too big. It was too expensive. I was starting to put them around the world, and they were about $100,000. Finding somebody with 100 grand in their back pocket isn’t so easy. So we wanted to make a small one.

This project was one of my student’s, a mechanical engineering undergraduate, Camille. Camille, my team, and I iterated all summer on how to make it cheaper, how to make it work better, and how to make it so other people could build it. Then we dropped them off in schools for seventh through eleventh grade.

If you want to be humbled, try to teach a kid something. I went into the school and said, “Set it to 65 percent humidity.” A seventh grader asked, “What’s humidity?” I said, “It’s water in air.” He said, “There’s no water in air. You’re an idiot.” I said, “All right, don’t trust me. Actually, don’t trust me. Set it to 100.”

He set it to 100, and what happened? It started to condense, make a fog, and eventually drip. He said, “Oh, humidity is rain. Why didn’t you just tell me that?” We’ve created an interface for this that’s much like a game. They have a 3D environment. They can log into it anywhere in the world on their smartphone or their tablet.

They have different parts of the bots, the physical components, the sensors. They select recipes that have been created by other kids anywhere in the world. They select and activate that recipe and plant a seedling. While it’s growing, they make changes. They’re like, “Why does a plant need CO2 anyway? Isn’t CO2 bad? It kills people.”

They crank up CO2, the plant dies. Or they crank down CO2, the plant does very well. They harvest the plant and they’ve created a new digital recipe. It’s an iterative design, development, and exploration process. They can then download all of the data about that new plant that they developed or the new digital recipe and see what it did. Was it better? Was it worse?

Imagine these as little cores of processing. We’re going to learn so much. Here is one of the food computers, as we call them, in a school after three weeks of growth. More importantly, it was the first time that this kid ever thought that he could be a farmer or that he would want to be a farmer.

We’ve open-sourced all of this. It’s all online. Go home and try to build your first food computer. It’s going to be difficult. We’re in the beginning, but it’s all there. It’s very important to me that this is easily accessible. We’re going to keep making it more accessible.

These are farmers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, environmental engineers, computer scientists, plant scientists, economists, and urban planners on one platform doing what they’re good at. But we got a little too big. I’m proud to announce this is my new facility that I’m just starting. This warehouse could be anywhere, and that’s why I chose it.

Inside this warehouse, we’re going to build something kind of like this. These farms exist right now. One set of systems grows greens. Another grows an Ebola vaccine. It’s amazing that plants and this DARPA Grand Challenge winner are one of the reasons we’re getting ahead of Ebola. The plants are producing the protein that’s Ebola resistant.

From pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals all the way down to lettuce, these systems exist. But these two kinds of systems look nothing alike, and that’s where I am with my field. Everything is different. We’re in that weird stage where everyone says, “Here’s my black box. No, buy mine. I’ve got intellectual property that’s totally valuable. Don’t buy his, buy mine.”

The reality is we’re just at the beginning, at a time when society is shifting too. When we asked for more, cheaper food, we’re now asking for better, environmentally friendly food. When McDonald’s is advertising what’s in the Chicken McNugget, the most mysterious food item of all time, and basing their marketing plan on that, everything is changing.

So into the world now, we are sending personal food computers, food servers, and food data centers run on the open phenome. Think open genome, but we’re going to put little climate recipes, like Wikipedia, that you can pull down, actuate, and grow. What does this look like in the world?

You remember the world connected by strings. We start having beacons. We start sending information about food rather than sending food. This is not just my fantasy. This is where we’re already deploying food computers, food servers, and soon food data centers, connecting people together to share information.

The future of food is not about fighting over what’s wrong with the current system. We know what’s wrong with it. The future of food is about networking the next one billion farmers and empowering them with a platform to ask and answer the question, “What if?”