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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab has figured out a lot of things over its thirty years of existence: it devised the electronic ink that makes e-readers possible, and the technology behind the video game Guitar Hero. Now the lab’s Open Agriculture (OpenAG) initiative has its sights set on a loftier goal: how to feed the world. Here’s how they’re looking to do it, and why it might actually work.

Caleb Harper, who leads the OpenAG group, and his team have made have made a big bet on a box called the OpenAG food computer [mit.edu]. It’s a morass of pink LED grow lights, wires, seed trays, and, if you’re there at harvest time, ready-to-pick vegetables, all housed in a structure the size of a shipping container. On my last visit, sturdy tomato plants held the most absurdly red fruit I’d ever seen. And yet, there was no soil to be seen, anywhere.

It works like this: plants are grown in plain boxes, with the stalk and fruit sprouting through the top and a tangle of wispy roots growing into the enclosed space below. The plants are fed a mist of nutrients—piped into the box at intervals controlled by a computer—that mimic what would be delivered by rich soil. The lab says their plants are two to three times more nutrient-dense, grow three to five times faster, and use 50 to 70 percent less water than conventional crops. But that’s not even the most impressive thing about the OpenAG food computer.

http://luckypeach.com/how-to-feed-the-world/ [luckypeach.com]

[Related]: https://engineering.purdue.edu/oatsgroup/ [purdue.edu] / http://www.islandcreekfoundation.org/vision/ [islandcreekfoundation.org]

I am sure that this is not new. However, I still felt it was newsworthy because such initiatives could help the poorer countries provide food for their growing populations.

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