 As Americans, the way we eat is not sustainable for much longer. The farming which supports our bad habits is inherently flawed. An estimated $165 billion are lost to wasted food every year. And the scarcity of water threatens to wipe out production in parts of the country, also threatening the balance of global food systems. But could technology be the answer? An MIT scientist is giving farming a facelift by building a platform for the next generation of food. An operating system for the farm of the future. About four years ago during Japan's tsunami, a group from the Media Lab went to Minami San Raku. We were looking at all different kinds of things. I was looking at food. The headlines that day said Japan farming has no youth, no water, no future. And so from that point I started thinking about contaminated areas and how could we put it back into production. You know, the strategy right now is these countries that are having food security issues go to another country and they buy their land and they make a farm. The problem with colonizing another place for food is often that place also doesn't have much food. You know, it's not a far stretch that when supply lines get stressed more, when our natural resources get stressed more, you will see a potential war over food. You'd have to protect it and militarize it and all these things, which I think is an awful way for the world to go. But if those countries start investing in their cities, which is where everybody's going to live anyway, that's the biggest change that I see happening for the relationship between this kind of agriculture and conventional agriculture. I'm Caleb Harper. I'm a research scientist. I'm also the founder of the City Farm Project, which is just looking at how do we feed our cities of the future, how do we move production closer to the point of consumption. City Farm is a plant research facility based in MIT's Media Lab. Using state-of-the-art equipment, they explore and build innovative and high-performance indoor agriculture systems. Through research and development of hydroponic or aquatic production, the lab uses an array of network sensors and computerized automation to deliver the most efficient means of growing plants without the need for soil. When I look at my lab, what do I see? I see a 1960s mainframe. I see vacuum tubes and plugs all over the place and one crazy maniacal man that goes back and forth filling holes in the dam. I mean, that's what I feel like and that's what I see, and that is to me the most accurate representation of the technology. We're at the beginning. We are not the first by far, but right now we're at this special moment where everybody cares because people are now asking for a level of transparency that they haven't asked for before. So that's why I'm making my work completely transparent to say, look, come check it out. I'm going to try to get one in your city. I'm going to try to get one around your kids for them to play with it and see what everybody thinks and so they can kind of educate through doing and then decide what they think of the food because we have to educate people. We have to bring people into this new method of growing. We have to create innovators. It's no longer the case that, you know, grow it there and eat it here. It's grow it here, eat it here. As you enter the space, you'll encounter what we think of as like a decontamination area. That's where we keep our server and our tools. Then you go into the next big volume and what you'll have is all the different kinds of equipment that we have in there. So there's aeroponic systems and then there's shallow water culture. Shallow water culture is just like two inches of water the plants sit in. Then there's deep water culture for bigger plants. Aeroponics is just where there's no longer standing water, we're just misting it. We're misting at about 50 microns a size, so a little heavier than fog. So it's just water and how we're using water and are we using it the most effectively for the plants. This is called a shallow water culture. So three inches of water, these nice bright white roots that come out. So what we're doing with this is continually recirculating this water around in the system. What you're seeing growing here is a variety of things. So in the lab we do a polycropped environment, which just means we try to grow a lot of different kinds of things rather than a mono crop. We have 12 points of sensing. So things like pH in the water makes a big difference. Electrical conductivity, so the amount of salts in the water. CO2 content, temperature, humidity. We control the photosynthetically active radiation levels. So that just is a big fancy word for the part of light that grows plants, which is about 10% of light. It falls between like red and blue. So we monitor and adjust that for both spectral balance and intensity. So I mean there's a lot of control and understanding going on in there. And so when we have a problem, you know, for a specific plant, we can kind of go back to the data we've collected and change the environment. What I'm working on and what a lot of people are working on needs to be thought of in concert with agriculture rather than us versus them. This is not a replacement. What's really going to happen is it's going to be implemented in strategic ways. You know, because on one side of the spectrum you have people that just love this. They're like, you know, it tastes better, it's fresher, it's better for you. And you have the other side that's like, this is freaky food. This is super freaky food. And what did you do with it? Because I as a consumer feel like I've been lied to for a long time about my food and I don't believe you. I think that's a conversation that from my perspective just needs to be open and say, look, you want to know what's going on with the water? Here it is. Open data right for you. Check it out. You want to be invested in your food again? I will hopefully be building sockets for you to plug into to where you can be reinvested in your food again and understand what's going on. There's a new farmer being born and the new farmer lives in the city and is young. You know, this is a new generation of people that can get interested in food in a different way. And it's existing farmers whose systems we can make better.