IEEE Spectrum February, 2016 - 13

Mit MediA lAb

the food Computer: This tabletop
machine lets you program the climate you
want for your tasty experiments.

food-growing system that his group calls
the Food Computer, or FC. As one of
Harper's recent papers explains, the FC
"creates a controlled environment using
robotic control systems and actuated climate, energy, and plant sensing mechanisms. Not unlike climate-controlled
data centers optimized for rows of servers, FCs are designed to optimize agricultural production by monitoring and
actuating a desired climate inside of a
growing chamber."
Sensors inside an FC monitor the
growing conditions for the crop and
fine-tune the light exposure, temperature, humidity, carbon-dioxide level,
water cycle, and nutrient exposure
according to a preset recipe for growing the plant. (FC plants do not grow in
soil but instead are either hydroponic,
with nutrients injected into the water
surrounding the roots or misted onto
the plant's dangling, open-air roots.)
The recipes for each crop, as well as
the controlling software and sensing

data, will all be freely circulated among
Food Computer users for tweaking and
improvement-regardless of whether
the FC is in a desert, the Antarctic, or
on another planet.
Food Computers, as OpenAG conceives them, come in three sizes, with
names that reveal Harper's data-center
design background. On a recent visit
to the Media Lab's fifth-floor OpenAG
development space, Camille Richman,
a me c h a n ic a l e n g i ne e r w it h t he
OpenAG Initiative, points out both a
tabletop prototype called the Personal
Food Computer and a plexiglass-walled
walk-in growing module the size of a
shipping container, filled with lights,
pipes, and racks of plants. "That's
the Food Server," she says. "And the
warehouse-scale unit, which is the biggest we're looking at, we're calling the
Food Data Center." The idea behind
making FCs in three sizes is to standardize agricultural tech platforms for
personal, small-scale, and large-scale
use. What's more, growing conditions
suitable to a particular crop that are
developed inside a tabletop-size Food
Computer can then be scaled up to the

shipping-container-size Food Server or
even the Food Data Center, which may
occupy part of a warehouse, factory, or
other large building.
To date, there are fewer than 10 Food
Computers worldwide: six Personal Food
Computers at MIT and Boston-area public schools, plus two Food Servers-one at
MIT and one at Cinvestav (the Center for
Research and Advanced Studies of the
National Polytechnic Institute) Unidad
Guadalajara, in Mexico. The first Food
Data Center is scheduled to be built near
MIT later this year.
But those numbers will undoubtedly
be growing, says Dickson Despommier,
emeritus professor of microbiology and
public health at Columbia University, in
New York City. The computerized vertical farming industry has been booming
in recent years and will only get bigger.
The expected explosion will come, he
says, largely as a result of the phenomenal
increase in efficiency that the latest generation of LED grow lights has introduced-
from 28 percent efficiency five years ago
to 68 percent today. Because grow lights'
power usage represents the largest chunk
of an indoor farm's operating expenses,
Despommier says, the cost savings that
the newest lights yield are enough to
make vertical farming increasingly economically viable.
Japan, he says, has 145 vertical farms;
Taiwan has 45. China just announced
an order for 20. And the United States
has more than a dozen scattered across
California, Delaware, New Jersey, Texas,
and Wyoming-and now, of course, in
Cambridge, Mass. (Though, to be clear,
only Cambridge has any of OpenAG's Food
Computer-related hardware or software.)
The time it takes to see a full return on
investment "has gone down from 10 or
12 years to between 6 and 8-and in some
cases, even 5 years," Despommier says.
"The other thing that's been remarkable
is, I don't know of any [vertical farming] company in the United States that
isn't in expansion mode. That tells you
everything." -M a R k a ndeRSon

nEwS

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

nORTh aMERICan

FEB 2016

http://www.verticalfarm.com http://www.verticalfarm.com http://openag.media.mit.edu/hardware/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/abstractAuthors.jsp?arnumber=7310847 http://www.media.mit.edu/people/rcamille http://SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum February, 2016