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Revolutionizing the Way We Grow Food | Nat Geo Live


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

( intro music )

Caleb Harper: My talk is about how to solve the global food crisis. Technology and seed is for an adverse world. What if you had a perfect world? Researching this, for me, took me to a place of learning about Mir Space Station. You know, the most space constrained environment, the least amount of resources. You know it costs them a lot of money to ship water into space. So, they created something on Mir called Aeroponics. That was inspirational to me where they create a fog in a box. And that fog is between five and fifty microns dense, and all of those microns of water contain also all the nutrients and the oxygen the plants need. The thing that inspired me is they reported that they use 98 percent less water. And that they grew anywhere like a theoretical possibility of twenty times faster plant production.

So, one square foot of soil grows three heads of broccoli in a year. That's if you have the water, if you don't have pests, if you have the fertilizer, if you... if, right? The farmer "if". Whereas in Aeroponics, we're producing 18. What if I just took one square foot of the tallest building in Boston, just one on the whole facade? I could get between three in the ground or 3,000 in that facade.

So, we started by hacking things from Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, you know, atomizers, nebulizers, learning about the technology of creating mist, making plants dance, killing a lot of plants, unfortunately. You know, we were technologists, a group of technologists falling backwards into a very old world. So, then we went to the first 60 square feet. Inside of this 60 square feet we're experimenting with all kinds of things. But I think most importantly, we fed about 300 people in the Media Lab, once a month, and we made a lot of local food donations.

But even better than that—the bright green colors, the bright white roots, the crispness, the quality of all of this food. You know, is this a new grocery store of the future? Is this a new restaurant? Is this just a pick-your-own lettuce patch for dorks? ( audience laughter ) This was the first time that many people in the Media Lab had ever ripped the roots off of anything. You know, it's just a reality. We get our salad in bags, and there's nothing wrong with that; we live in the city. But you know, this created a spark of inspiration that said, "Well, maybe, you know, maybe image-based processing and machine learning has something to do with food."

You can log into this farm. So, you log in, you monitor the system. You get a history. That history becomes a digital recipe. These are all the broccolis in my lab by IP address. Right. We have IP addressable broccolis. We create all this cool stuff; now we got to email it. Why are we shipping things? Why are we shipping with planes, trains, and automobiles? Why can't we email food like we email information? So, Willy Wonka style, why can't we particle-ize it and then send it over to the other side to be reconstituted somewhere else?

If this seems crazy, we're already doing it. These are labs that I am sending all over the world in different places. So, this really becomes just a platform.

So, here are the tools. First personal computer for food we call it GRO-bot. GRO-bot is a hacker platform for kids. We're trying to get this done super-cheap and send it all over the world. This is what I am doing. I am connecting school children that experiment and want to know: why does a plant grow tall? Why is it short? Why does it taste funny? Why does algae grow in the water? But then we are recording that. And they can email that to their friend. But even more importantly, say they express a novel protein, and that novel protein is incredibly important to humanity. We never knew it existed because those climates that the kids created playing don't exist on Earth. So, if you can distribute all of this across the world, you can make breakthroughs so much faster.

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