Agriculture

Boon Uranukul PhD '19 co-founded Terra Oleo, a startup working to “develop microbes that can transform agricultural waste into a variety of oils,” reports Tim De Chant for TechCrunch. “The company selected three yeast species based on the microbes’ abilities to produce certain oils when fed with organic waste, including from agriculture and biodiesel production,” explains de Chant. “It then used genetic and metabolic engineering to boost and tune their ability to produce certain fats and triglycerides.” 

Tech Crunch reporter Tim De Chant spotlights Fieldstone Bio, an MIT startup that turns microbes into sensors to support agricultural and national security efforts. “Each strain is tailored to sense a particular compound, such as nitrogen on a farm field or TNT residue from a landmine,” explains De Chant. “After the microbes have some time to sense their environment — several hours to days, depending on the target — the company will have another drone snap photos of the area.” 

MIT engineers have developed a new system that helps pesticides adhere more effectively to plant leaves, allowing farmers to use fewer chemicals without sacrificing crop protection, reports Michigan Farm News. The new technology “adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, increasing the stickiness of pesticides by as much as a hundredfold.”

“A breakthrough from MIT researchers and AgZen, a spinoff company, is making agricultural spraying more efficient—cutting pesticide waste, lowering costs, and reducing environmental impact,” reports Rural Radio Network. “The technology works with existing sprayers, eliminating the need for costly equipment changes. In field tests, it doubled product retention on crops like soybeans and kale. AgZen’s spray-monitoring system, RealCoverage, has already helped farmers reduce pesticide use by 30 to 50 percent, and the new coating could improve efficiency even further.” 

Research Scientist Susan Amrose speaks with Knowable Magazine reporter Lele Nargi about the use of inland desalination for farming communities. Amrose, who studies inland desalination in the Middle East and North Africa, is “testing a system that uses electrodialysis instead of reverse osmosis,” explains Nargi. “This sends a steady surge of voltage across water to pull salt ions through an alternating stack of positively charged and negatively charged membranes.” 

New York Times reporter Eric Lipton spotlights Prof. Christopher Voigt and his team’s “radical effort to engineer nature to fight climate change” by creating genetically modified bacteria to help reduce the use of chemical fertilizers. Lipton notes that Voigt is “a rock star of sorts in the fast-growing field of biological engineering.” 

Prof. Kripa Varanasi and Vishnu Jayaprakash SM '19, PhD '22  founded AgZen, a company aimed at reducing pesticide use by employing a feedback-optimized spraying system, reports Steven Savage for Forbes. Savage notes that for the researchers behind AgZen, “MIT turned out to be a good place to work on the specific imaging technology and on the AI needed to translate that into a practical solution for farmers.”

Prof. Desirée Plata and her research team have designed “a kind of clay that mimics the behavior of underwater microorganisms to break down methane into water and carbon dioxide,” reports Ivy Scott for The Boston Globe. “The estimates are that you could save a half a degree of warming by 2100 if you cut human-made methane emissions in half, so that’s a pretty big deal,” says Plata. “It’s the only greenhouse gas that can do that. It’s just a question of whether or not we’ll start to see people doing that ... [regionally] and in Massachusetts.”

Prof. Kripa Varanasi and Vishnu Jayaprakash SM '19, PhD '21 co-founded AgZen, an MIT spinoff that is developing new technologies to improve the performance and effectiveness of pesticide treatments, reports The Economist. The new technologies “could reduce the total amount of fungicides and insecticides sprayed over complete crops by some 90%, as well as cutting the amount of adjuvants required,” writes The Economist.

New York Times reporter Stephen Wallis spotlights Prof. Carlo Ratti’s proposal for the world’s first “farmscraper” in Shenzhen, China, a 51-story building that would be wrapped in a vertical hydroponic farm and could produce enough food annually to feed 40,000 people. “At this critical moment, what we architects do matters more than ever,” Ratti emphasizes. “Every kilowatt-hour of solar power, every unit of zero-carbon housing and every calorie of sustainably sourced vegetables will be multiplied across history.”

TechCrunch reporter Haje Jan Kamps spotlights AgZen, an MIT startup that has developed a new tool that optimizes the use of pesticides to avoid over application. “The real winner in all of this may prove to be public health and the environment,” writes Jan Kamps. “By reducing foliar pesticide usage by 30% to 50%, AgZen’s technology might help mitigate [environmental] impacts, aligning with the critical need for improved spray efficiency highlighted in recent reports.”

Prof. Kripa Varanasi and Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’21, MS ’19 have launched AgZen, a company that is trying to reduce pesticide use through the development of additives that allow more pesticide droplets to stick to plants, reports Ian Mount for Fortune. “Globally, farms are spending about $60 billion a year on these pesticides, and our goal is to try to get them to cut that down while still not compromising on pest control,” says Jayaprakash.

Researchers at MIT have developed a silk-based biodegradable substitute for microplastics, reports Ysabelle Kempe for Scientific American. “This type of research is urgent for companies that face tightening regulations on deliberate use of microplastics,” writes Kempe.

This summer’s heat waves and droughts have brought forth a series of issues including disruption of crop production, further inflation, and electrical issues, reports Colin Lodewick for Fortune. “I think it’s too early to quantify, but I have no doubt that these extreme events are contributing to high prices,” says Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “In the future, if we don’t change the course of action, it’s going to be worse.” 

Nature reporter Neil Savage spotlights Prof. Michael Strano’s work developing a new technique to use nanoparticles to alter the biology of living plants. Savage writes that the new technique can allow for "the design of nanoparticles that carry gene-editing machinery to targeted areas to rewrite the plant’s genome and imbue it with properties such as pest and disease resistance,” writes Savage.