What goes into making plants taste good? For scientists in MIT’s Media Lab, it takes a combination of botany, machine-learning algorithms, and some good old-fashioned chemistry.
Using all of the above, researchers in the Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative report that they have created basil plants that are likely more delicious than any you have ever tasted. No genetic modification is involved: The researchers used computer algorithms to determine the optimal growing conditions to maximize the concentration of flavorful molecules known as volatile compounds.
But that is just the beginning for the new field of “cyber agriculture,” says Caleb Harper, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Media Lab and director of the OpenAg group. His group is now working on enhancing the human disease-fighting properties of herbs, and they also hope to help growers adapt to changing climates by studying how crops grow under different conditions.
“Our goal is to design open-source technology at the intersection of data acquisition, sensing, and machine learning, and apply it to agricultural research in a way that hasn’t been done before,” Harper says. “We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction.”
In their study of basil plants, which appears in the April 3 issue of PLOS ONE, the researchers found, to their surprise, that exposing plants to light 24 hours a day generated the best flavor. Traditional agricultural techniques would never have yielded that insight, says John de la Parra, the research lead for the OpenAg group and an author of the study.
“You couldn’t have discovered this any other way. Unless you’re in Antarctica, there isn’t a 24-hour photoperiod to test in the real world,” he says. “You had to have artificial circumstances in order to discover that.”
Harper and Risto Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, are the senior authors of the paper. Arielle Johnson, a director’s fellow at the Media Lab, and Elliot Meyerson of Cognizant Technology Solutions are the lead authors, and Timothy Savas, a special projects assistant at the Open Agriculture Initiative, is also an author.
Located in a warehouse in Middleton, Massachusetts, the OpenAg plants are grown in shipping containers that have been retrofitted so that environmental conditions, including light, temperature, and humidity, can be carefully controlled.
Open Ag research lead John de la Parra in a shipping container that has been specially outfitted to grow plants under controlled environmental conditions. Credit: Melanie Gonick
This kind of agriculture has many names — controlled environmental agriculture, vertical farming, urban farming — and is still a niche market, but is growing fast, Harper says. In Japan, one such “plant factory” produces hundreds of thousands of heads of lettuce every week. However, there have also been many failed efforts, and there is very little sharing of information between companies working to develop these types of facilities.
One goal of the MIT initiative is to overcome that kind of secrecy, by making all of the OpenAg hardware, software, and data freely available.
“There is a big problem right now in the agricultural space in terms of lack of publicly available data, lack of standards in data collection, and lack of data sharing,” Harper says. “So while machine learning and artificial intelligence and advanced algorithm design have moved so fast, the collection of well-tagged, meaningful agricultural data is way behind. Our tools being open-source, hopefully they will get spread faster and create the ability to do networked science together.
