Caleb Harper says that we need to find better ways to grow food. He tells us that the average apple in a grocery store in the United States is ten months old. The apples are picked and then sent to cold storage to slow down the aging process. Ninety percent of the apple's nutrients and anti-oxidants are gone by time the apple reaches the consumer.
In his TED Talk This computer will grow your food in the future Harper asks what would happen if each region in the world had its own productive agricultural climate, and how it could improve the quality of life and food security.
The greatest food problem of the last generation was that more food was needed, and the food was required to be inexpensive. This led to several regions producing large amounts of food and then transporting it to food poor regions. Caleb's solution is a digital farm, a newly imagined method to take an apple from one continent and send it to another.
After a few years of studying plants and growth methods Harper started the CityFARM inside MIT's Media Lab. In an area spanning 600 square feet the farm was able to create food to feed 300 people once a month. This led to building a mobile lab that could be shipped worldwide - labs that can take a climate's characteristics and 'code' them into a unit that can then grow the food from that climate. Nutrition, size, shape, color and texture of a plant can be copied if the proper data is studied and replicated.
This talk addresses not just issues of food security but the fact that the farming population is growing older and phasing out while a very small number of future farmers is coming to replace them. Making the farming community more reliable on data will democratize the process and allow anyone to create the right growing conditions for peak nutritional food. Caleb's hope is that one day instead of sending food to different places around the world we can send the information and data required to grow the food.
Harper is a great speaker telling engaging stories inside the framework of his vision. He talks about his never ending lettuce sampling and how he can tell the pH of lettuce within 0.1 by tasting. He shows a data recording of broccoli plants and explains that each specific plant has its own ip address. He shows a plant's profile of water needs, nutrition characteristics and the perfect time to harvest, saying that this could be the first entry in Plant Facebook.