MIT scientists say computers are the future of agriculture
The word ‘agriculture’ connotes certain images: workers toiling under the sun, vast fields of crops, tractors, and plows. It’s a world apart from shiny Silicon Valley, but technology has always been as integral to agriculture as any other sector, where new equipment and techniques can maximize efficiency, safety, and crop yield. Now gleaming computers and dusty fields are merging – and potentially changing agriculture as we know it.
A team of researchers from MIT Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative published a paper detailing a recent study where machine learning algorithms were used to optimize growing conditions for basil plants (with an eye on more expansive future use cases). The burgeoning field – called “cyber agriculture” by the scientists – combines a variety of disciplines to grow the most flavorful, disease-resistant crops possible in a given environment.
“Our goal is to design open-source technology at the intersection of data acquisition, sensing, and machine learning, and apply it to agricultural research in a way that hasn’t been done before,” says Open Agriculture director and MIT Media Lab principal research scientist Caleb Harper. “We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction.”
Open Agriculture performs the studies in its warehouse headquarters at MIT-Bates Laboratory. Inside are specially-retrofitted shipping containers, designed “so that environmental conditions, including light, temperature, and humidity, can be carefully controlled.” The ability to artificially control conditions in these “food computers” has already yielded unexpected insight – the researchers’ initial study of basil plants revealed the plants had the best flavor after being exposed to round-the-clock light. “You couldn’t have discovered this any other way,” said John de la Parra, one of several co-authors of the study and an OpenAg research lead.
The burgeoning field of cyber agriculture has long suffered from siloed information, making MIT’s commitment to open-source tools especially significant. Equally so is their use of machine-learning algorithms, developed in conjunction with Cognizant, that “evaluated millions of possible combinations of light and UV duration, and generated sets of conditions that would maximize flavor, including the 24-hour daylight regime.”
Researchers have now set their sights on “developing basil plants with higher levels of compounds that could help to combat diseases such as diabetes” without any genetic modification while continuing to explore the effects of different environmental features. De la Parra calls the paper “the archetype” for future large-scale applications of the tools, as well as an opportunity to study climate change adaptation in far quicker, controlled ways than in nature. More insight will surely be gleaned from further study, but initial returns are clear: the future of agriculture may very well mix analog and digital realms for the best results.
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Aroon Indicator for IYW shows an upward move is likely
IYW's Aroon Indicator triggered a bullish signal on August 22, 2025. Tickeron's A.I.dvisor detected that the AroonUp green line is above 70 while the AroonDown red line is below 30. When the up indicator moves above 70 and the down indicator remains below 30, it is a sign that the stock could be setting up for a bullish move. Traders may want to buy the stock or look to buy calls options. A.I.dvisor looked at 361 similar instances where the Aroon Indicator showed a similar pattern. In of the 361 cases, the stock moved higher in the days that followed. This puts the odds of a move higher at .
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Bullish Trend Analysis
The Momentum Indicator moved above the 0 level on September 03, 2025. You may want to consider a long position or call options on IYW as a result. In of 75 past instances where the momentum indicator moved above 0, the stock continued to climb. The odds of a continued upward trend are .
The Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) for IYW just turned positive on September 10, 2025. Looking at past instances where IYW's MACD turned positive, the stock continued to rise in of 50 cases over the following month. The odds of a continued upward trend are .
Following a 3-day Advance, the price is estimated to grow further. Considering data from situations where IYW advanced for three days, in of 367 cases, the price rose further within the following month. The odds of a continued upward trend are .
Bearish Trend Analysis
The RSI Indicator has been in the overbought zone for 2 days. Expect a price pull-back in the near future.
The Stochastic Oscillator demonstrated that the ticker has stayed in the overbought zone for 6 days. The longer the ticker stays in the overbought zone, the sooner a price pull-back is expected.
Following a 3-day decline, the stock is projected to fall further. Considering past instances where IYW declined for three days, the price rose further in of 62 cases within the following month. The odds of a continued downward trend are .
IYW broke above its upper Bollinger Band on September 15, 2025. This could be a sign that the stock is set to drop as the stock moves back below the upper band and toward the middle band. You may want to consider selling the stock or exploring put options.
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