Open-Source Agriculture Initiative—Food for the Future?

Abstract

In the 10,000 years of agriculture’s history, advancements have enabled three society-altering revolutions. We believe that food computing, an alternative, distributed farming system based on new methods of communication, sensing, data collection, and automation, will enable network-effect advantages in the next generation of food production and give rise to the Internet of Food and the next agricultural revolution. At the MIT OpenAG Initiative, we are working on building this new digital-plant-recipe-centric network, a database of “climate recipes” for achieving the desired phenotypic expression of the plant in question. The food computer, or FC, that we are developing is a term for an agricultural technology platform that creates a controlled environment using robotic control systems and actuated climate, energy, and plant sensing mechanisms, designed to optimize agricultural production by monitoring and actuating a desired climate inside of a growing chamber that in turn creates desired phenotypic traits in plants. With iterative experimentation, we could hypothetically map the entire phenome of a selected plant and correlate certain phenotypic traits with specific environmental stimuli—our Open Phenome Project, a catalog of the epigenetic expression of plant life. Currently, the commercially available systems are being developed as closed proprietary systems noncompatible with other platforms of the same scale or across scales. We imagine a very different future, with open and cross-compatible technology platforms underlying a distributed network of FCs of various scales using digital plant recipes and the controlled environment climate as the scaling factor.