Is Cyber-Agriculture in Your Stores Future?

Combining agriculture, computer power, statistical models and chemical analysis, researchers have learned how to maximize the flavor of basil plants, a preliminary step toward optimizing food growth, and open-sourcing the technology to do so.

The scientists, from the Open Agriculture (OpenAg) Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), say that “cyber-agriculture” could additionally aid in the production of pharmaceutical plants and other plants used in industry, such as cotton, to increase favorable traits and better adapt crops to the effects of climate change, according to RDMag.com.

What is ‘cyber-agriculture’? The Open Agriculture Initiative tells R&D Mag that they coined the phrase to encompass a number of controlled-environment agriculture technologies that combine robotic systems of environmental control, precision monitoring of a plant’s response to specific stimuli, and statistical and machine learning models to study and enhance yield and quality of agriculture crops.   

The OpenAg researchers seek to make the technology and techniques they develop accessible, and available to be further built upon, so that the work can help tackle global issues such as food security and the impact of climate change on agriculture.  When we work together in ag – everyone wins. For more on Ag, check out our weekly podcast – Farm, Food, Facts available everywhere you listen to podcasts – even on Alexa.