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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IYW sees its Stochastic Oscillator recovers from oversold territory
On January 03, 2025, the Stochastic Oscillator for IYW moved out of oversold territory and this could be a bullish sign for the stock. Traders may want to buy the stock or buy call options. Tickeron's A.I.dvisor looked at 51 instances where the indicator left the oversold zone. In of the 51 cases the stock moved higher in the following days. This puts the odds of a move higher at over .
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Bullish Trend Analysis
IYW moved above its 50-day moving average on January 03, 2025 date and that indicates a change from a downward trend to an upward trend.
Following a 3-day Advance, the price is estimated to grow further. Considering data from situations where IYW advanced for three days, in of 376 cases, the price rose further within the following month. The odds of a continued upward trend are .
The Aroon Indicator entered an Uptrend today. In of 383 cases where IYW Aroon's Indicator entered an Uptrend, the price rose further within the following month. The odds of a continued Uptrend are .
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The Momentum Indicator moved below the 0 level on January 07, 2025. You may want to consider selling the stock, shorting the stock, or exploring put options on IYW as a result. In of 78 cases where the Momentum Indicator fell below 0, the stock fell further within the subsequent month. The odds of a continued downward trend are .
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 .
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