The future of Agriculture is Bright


There is a big problem right now in the agricultural space in terms of lack of publicly available data, lack of standards in data collection, and lack of data sharing. So while machine learning and artificial intelligence and advanced algorithm design have moved so fast, the collection of well-tagged, meaningful agricultural data could help to identify the growth, life cycle, productivity, and quality of crops/plants. This can be achieved by growing plants under controlled environments. 

What is hydroponics?

Plants grow through a process called photosynthesis, in which they use sunlight and a chemical inside their leaves called chlorophyll to convert carbon dioxide (a gas in the air) and water into glucose (a type of sugar) and oxygen. Write that out chemically and you get this equation:

6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2

There's no mention of "soil" anywhere in there—and that's all the proof you need that plants can grow without it. What they do need is water and nutrients, both easily obtained from the soil. But if they can get these things somewhere else—say, by standing with their roots in a nutrient-rich solution—they can do without soil altogether.



The optimum wavelength of LEDs for plant growth

Remember, white light is made up of all of the colors of the spectrum. Plants use the portion of the spectrum that falls in the visible range (400-700nm wavelength). Ironically, visible light makes up about 45 percent of the total solar spectrum. That means plants can only use about half of the sun’s energy. 


Plants don’t require every wavelength of the light spectrum. As per research violet, blue, and red wavelength contributes to the plant growth, life cycle, productivity. So, one could choose specific wavelength LEDs to illuminate these plants. The light can be controlled with sensors that can be integrated to study the temperature, moisture, and humidity parameters.

Thus the approach involves growing plants under different sets of conditions in hydroponic containers This setup allowed them to vary the light duration and the duration of exposure. Once the plants are full-grown, the researchers can evaluate the quality, growth cycle, productivity.


Reference:
http://news.mit.edu/2019/algorithm-growing-agriculture-0403

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