Personal Food Computer

The personal food computer looks like a fish tank. It’s the right shape and size, but there’s no water. Inside the two-foot-long box, under glowing purple LED lights, lettuces and legumes sprout up, their roots, free of dirt, misted by digitally-controlled sprayers. It’s a tiny, low-water, climate-controlled agriculture system, designed for growing food in cramped city quarters. The machine is plugged into a network, so all the environmental information runs into a database, where other farmers can see how much water and light the plants are getting, and use that data to tweak the way they grow their own crops.

Call it open-source farming or data-driven agriculture. Either way, it’s a way to program how we grow what we eat. Caleb Harper, an engineer with a background in architecture and design, developed the personal food computer. He also runs the City Farm group, which looks at innovative ways to grow food in urban areas, at MIT’s Media Lab. He thinks his contraption is the future of food.

Read more: