Two years ago, then MIT graduate student Caleb Harper built a fully networked farm of tomatoes, lettuce, and broccoli inside a fourth-floor lounge at the school’s famed Media Lab. He hoped to prove he could use data science to optimize crop yields, boost nutrient density, and trim water consumption by 98 percent compared with traditional dirt farming, all of which he did. But there was no meaningful way to share his data with the world. Despite an ongoing boom in agricultural technology, no one cared about his findings or dared to share theirs. This September, he launched the Open Agriculture Initiative, the first open-source platform for global agriculture and food hackers.
Popular Science: How is agriculture not open-source? Don’t we pretty much know how to grow a tomato?
Caleb Harper: No. Traditional agriculture is closed and opaque. It’s understood by very few people at a production scale. How do I find nutritional-uptake studies on lettuce? Where can I get data on crop yields in Ghana? We want people to research this stuff, share it online, and grow healthier food and more of it around the world. There’s a huge appetite for this.