These Food Computers Use AI To Make "Climate Recipes" For The Best-Tasting Crops

As climate change makes it more difficult to grow crops in outdoor farms because of heat waves, more frequent storms, and more pests and disease, the researchers envision that climate-controlled, tech-filled greenhouses (which they call "food computers") could be an increasingly useful place to grow food. The technology could also eliminate food miles: Instead of shipping avocados from Mexico to China, a Chinese greenhouse could precisely recreate a Mexican climate in Beijing–or tweak it to create a climate even better for an avocado tree. "It definitely speeds up the timescale by which we can get interesting results," says Arielle Johnson, one of the researchers at MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative, or OpenAg. "When you talk to [Caleb Harper, the director of OpenAg], he's like, 'Yeah, basil is a fast-growing plant,' but in his terminology, fast-growing is six to eight weeks," says Babak Hodjat, CEO of Sentient, a company that also designs AI to help stock traders find patterns in the market and hospitals predict infections. "That's a long time to wait just to get a data point. So we tried out this methodology where the AI itself decides what are the next set of data points to try out."