Principal Investigator Caleb Harper
Project Website http://openag.media.mit.edu/
Project Start Date January 2015
Project End Date April 2020
NOTE: Open Agriculture (OpenAg) was active from January 2015 to April 2020.
At the MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture (OpenAG) Initiative we are on a mission to create healthier, more engaging, and more inventive future food systems. We believe the precursor to a healthier and more sustainable food system will be the creation of an open-source ecosystem of food technologies that enable and promote transparency, networked experimentation, education, and hyper-local production. The OpenAG Initiative brings together partners from industry, government, and academia to develop an open source "food tech" research collective for the creation of the global agricultural hardware, software, and data commons. Together we will build collaborative tools and open technology platforms for the exploration of future food systems.
Food Computers, as we call them, will serve as tools for users to experiment, innovate, hack, and grow. Every time users grow and harvest, they will contribute to a library of climate recipes that can be borrowed and scaled so that users around the world can gain access to the best and freshest foods.
OpenAg is developing an open-source ecosystem that enables and promotes transparency, networked experimentation, education, and local production. Together, we hope to create sustainable, shared systems that will break down the barrier of entry and spark interest, conversation, and maybe even a revolution about the way we view food.
In the 10,000 years of its history, advancements in agriculture have enabled three society-altering revolutions. From the domestication of plants and the resulting first human settlements in 8,000 BC, to the horse and plow and the rise of technology-based societies in 600 AD, and finally to the vertical integration of farming brought on by the mechanization, chemical fertilization, and biotechnology of today, agricultural revolution has always been the driving force behind humanity’s societal progress.
The current industrialized food system feeds 7.2 billion people, of which more than 50% live in cities and only 3% are involved in the production of their own food. With natural resource scarcity, flattening yields, loss of biodiversity, changing climate, and booming urban populations, our current food system is rapidly approaching its natural limit.
What will define the fourth agricultural revolution and how will it impact global societies?
OpenAg’s Food Computer solution was inspired by director Caleb Harper’s trip to Japan in 2011 following the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. The land was damaged and poisoned by radiation, and it was unclear at the time whether traditional outdoor agriculture would be sustainable under such harsh environmental conditions, and whether that food would be safe to eat. The idea for the Food Computer came about, and extended into a solution to the general problem that outdoor climate cannot be controlled.