- I never knew about agriculture.
I never heard the word before.
- I probably thought of the typical,
the sheep says baa
and the horse says neigh kind of thing.
- Right away, probably a big red barn with livestock.
- When I thought like a farmer,
farmer's like a person that just got a lot of open space.
- Someone who's harvesting crops.
- A person with a beard.
- Has a long beard and a straw hat.
- Farmer has meant this thing that other people
do in a particular place and I think that's part
of what's changing.
We're in a really exciting time when we think
about agriculture and really redefining
what it means to be engaged in agriculture.
Winter is the time for us to plan
for the rest of the season.
There's constant activity around care and feeding
of the animals.
And also really getting ready for the spring plantings.
Howard Buffett says that each farmer only has
40 seasons within their own lifetime to learn from.
And yet if we collaborate, we have the potential
of hundreds or thousands of lifetimes of experience
to apply to our decision-making for the next season.
I'm the research director here at Wolfe's Neck Center
for Agriculture and the Environment.
It's 600 acres of farm on Casco Bay.
I'm also a farmer and my background
is in natural resources and earth system science
and particularly the study of open source technology
and using technology to connect with the environment.
Some of the challenges that we're facing in agriculture
is to produce more food in a changing climate.
We have an unprecedented ability to restore and regenerate
a lot of the landscapes.
We use a lot of open source technology.
Raspberry Pi computers to UNIX operating systems
to basic sensor design and networking.
All of these things build on one another.
We have the potential for every farm,
every backyard to essentially be a personal research farm.
To grow food where it was not being grown previously.
- The mission of MARSfarm is to grow plants on Mars.
If you look at Mars as a test bed for ways
that we can improve agriculture on Earth,
it's hard to see a correlation between the two of them,
but that's only because on Earth,
if you throw a seed outside,
there's a decent change that's it's going to grow.
What that experience really keeps you from seeing
is that that's not the optimal way for that plant to grow.
We, as MARSfarm, designed and built the MVP,
or Minimum Viable Product Food Computer.
Encapsulate that into almost a formula to grow a plant
and generate recipes so that anybody could grow any plant
anywhere given they have the proper environment.
- We do that specifically by providing kits for teachers
to grow plants in their classroom with their students.
- There's many versions of the food computer out there.
With some of the more advanced food computers,
not a lot of people are able to build them.
Some of these sensors can be hundreds of dollars
just for one sensor.
What we try to do with the MVP
is really pare it down to the bare necessities you need
to get a decent amount of science that anyone can build.
- Through our open source project,
there have been at least 100 different groups
who've built our food computers.
You think of the expense of owning 500 acres
and a combine.
It's a multi-million dollar small business.
That's not easy to enter.
The average age of a farmer is 58 and that's a big area
of talent that right now is gonna be leaving the workforce.
We see, though, the impact biggest impact
we can have is by educating the future generation.
- That feels too far forward.
- A FarmBot is basically a robotic farm
that you can do from your house or other parts of the world.
So we were trying to make a sequence that when you plant,
we're trying to get seeds that can be planted by controls
and the sequence that plants seeds for us.
And it's pretty difficult, but we got it.
- Aquaponics is where you use fish to help spread
bacteria in the water and help other plants grow.
- Aquaponics turns out to be a really natural way
to produce more food faster.
- One group is time-lapse,
sees the plants and how fast they can grow throughout time.
And another group is working on sensors for the plants.
- In the United States, the obesity rate is high.
Our business is to create the food computers
and provide them in different
elementary and middle schools so that kids can have the
mindset of choosing healthier food.
- I'm picking up stuff in Baltimore,
Chris is doing stuff in Long Island,
Chantell's doing stuff in St. Louis.
Everyone sees different challenges in what they're doing
and is picking up on these different solutions
based on open source technology.
- So we know that today
we're gonna kick off our hydroponics.
What was a really great opportunity was meeting
a bunch of like-minded educators
who were doing similar things
and we said why not have our students
trade that data with one another.
Let's talk about what we're growing,
why we're growing it.
Today we planted our seeds in the garden.
- (speaking in Spanish)
- The sharing of all the ideas is so important
because, one, it levels the playing field.
This is where you guys just introduce,
hey, here's who we are and here's where we live,
here's what our project's about.
- Oh, wow.
- This global world into reality
so it doesn't feel like such a large world,
that there's ways to reach out and kids can see
beyond where they live.
- I think creating ways for everybody to essentially engage
in asking these agriculture questions
is really profoundly important.
We can become better farmers by sharing our knowledge
with one another and create a points of intersection
that transcend cultural boundaries
between rural and urban environments.
- Students have to look at open source
and problem solving and engineering and things
and say well, I'm not gonna wait for what the future
has in store for me.
I'm gonna direct where I'm gonna go in the future.
- Agriculture and the food that's produced
should look like the community that's producing it.
- So this whole idea of what a farmer is, is gonna change.
It has to change.
- Before this class, I never really looked at what we did
as called farming.
- It was an eye-opener for a lot of us, including myself.
- Kind of never expected a farmer
to be mostly like technology.
- A farm can be anywhere,
it doesn't have to be in this big field that's empty.
It can be in your own house.
A farmer could be anyone.
- So I do consider myself a farmer.
- I wanna grow plants to sell to the public.
- I kinda want my community to truly change
about the way they eat and the way we live.
- It's so amazing to think that it doesn't matter
what season, we can always have a food source.
- We're all coming together to help solve problems
that are really going to be important
when we inherit the world.