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A better basil exists, but it\u2019s being grown in an environment that resembles something more likely to show up on an episode of Star Trek<\/em> than in any backyard garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The team of MIT scientists behind it are calling their process \u201ccyber agriculture,\u201d a method of growing plants in shipping containers retrofitted with lots of high-tech gear that brings crazy levels of precision control to the environment. That entails using complex computers to track a plant\u2019s minor genetic and epigenetic changes over time while searching for the right balance of temperature, humidity, level of ultraviolet light, and light-exposure time, among other things, to create the conditions that will encourage the basil to producer a richer, tastier version of itself. They call it a \u201cclimate recipe,\u201d but really it\u2019s using machine learning technology to farm. The details of their work were\u00a0published April 3<\/a>\u00a0in the journal PLOS ONE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant\u2019s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction,\u201d said researcher Caleb Harper in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of this research is being conducted in Middleton, Massachusetts, a small town about 20 miles (32 km) north of Boston. It\u2019s there that the MIT team tends to a hydroponic farm of basil plants<\/a>. They\u2019ve discovered some interesting details: For instance, the plants tend to taste better when they have exposure to light all 24 hours of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou couldn\u2019t have discovered this any other way. Unless you\u2019re in Antarctica, there isn\u2019t a 24-hour photoperiod to test in the real world,\u201d said John de la Parra, a co-author of the study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The scientists are making their data available to the public at no charge. Right now, there are companies working on similar high-tech hydroponic farming. Toshiba is churning out lettuce<\/a>, it\u2019s happening on rooftops in China<\/a>, and a company called Farm.One is growing food out of basements in Manhattan<\/a>. But most of these companies keep their techniques under wraps, making it hard for more people to enter the market or for nonprofit initiatives to get off the ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A better basil exists, but it\u2019s being grown in an environment that resembles something more likely to show up on an episode of Star Trek than in any backyard garden. The team of MIT scientists behind it are calling their process \u201ccyber agriculture,\u201d a method of growing plants in shipping containers retrofitted with lots of high-tech gear… Scientists made better-tasting basil through \u201ccyber farming\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food-news","category-susatinable-food","category-what-to-read-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1970,"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions\/1970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmyschmidt.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}