Gallery: A Bionic Garden Grows in Brooklyn: Tracking Tomatoes Wirelessly at Feedback Farms
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In January, agriculture-obsessed software programmer Tom Hallaran walked by a frosty vacant lot a couple of blocks from his Brooklyn apartment and decided the future of bionic gardening was staring him in the face. Three months later Hallaran and colleagues Clare Sullivan, Kallie Weinkle and Gregory Sogorka, known collectively as [Feedback Farms](http://www.feedbackfarms.com/), broke ground on an experiment that enables sensor-embedded planters filled with tomatoes and kale to wirelessly transmit information about soil conditions to a custom-designed dashboard installed on Hallaran's laptop. With their creation, the techno-farmers can remotely track how their crops are are faring. "The irony is that you do want to go out and feel the soil with your fingers," says Hallaran, who points out that the big benefits of surveillance gardening will be reaped next summer. *Photo courtesy of Feedback Farms*
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The Experiment -------------- "We're monitoring moisture and light at various stages for a test to evaluate five different planter designs," Hallaran says. "We've got 40 beds on half the lot. Each bed is planted with the same varieties of kale and tomatoes, but in randomized positions, The types of beds are also randomized. We're evaluating yield and crop quality." Hallaran, who studied software design at Reed College before dropping out and spent summers during high school and college working on New England farms, designed a virtual dashboard that displays key information about how the plants are progressing. "If you're trying to coordinate production on two lots that are in this case, in Brooklyn, about a half mile apart, how do you prioritize which one to check out if you have limited labor?" *Photo courtesy of Feedback Farms*
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Sub-Irrigation -------------- "In the city, you've got problems with heavy metals so we designed this sub-irrigated container system instead of growing crops in the ground." Feedback Farms' lot tested over a thousand parts per million of lead contamination plus some cadmium arsenic contamination. "We wanted to grow plants that need deep soil like tomatoes without using heavy equipment or fancy irrigation systems," he says. For water supply, Hallaran says "We put 25 feet of perforated Flex Strain drainage tube in every bed, which serves as a reservoir for water. We fill that with this engineered potting mix from upstate New York. This soil mix is not very dense so it has a lot of capillary action that sucks up that water and also oxygen. It's really all about taking advantage of the capability of plants to draw up water from sub-surface water. We're getting tremendous yields out of the tomatoes and we only have to water about once a week in the summer. Which for tomatoes is pretty amazing."  *Photo courtesy of Feedback Farms*
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Planter Sacks ------------- Feedback Farms loads up so-called Super Sacks, usually used for transporting heavy stone and building materials, with about a third of a cubic yard of soil mixtures. These supersack planters, grouped in "Pods" of five and tracked according to bar-coded seedling packets, are embedded with moisture sensors sensors that help Hallaran and company determine which soil mixtures produce the best yields. *Photo courtesy of Feedback Farms*
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Open Data Collection -------------------- Feedback Farms collects data on the lot using [ZygBee radios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee) accessible via a Wi-Fi Ethernet bridge. "That data goes into a flexible analytic platform that I designed so we can deal with the information there," says Hallaran. "Right now we're just collecting data for the experiment. From there, an Android app organizes the garden's data. "It's called an Open Data Kit, which allows you to design a customized form for data collection," Hallaran says. "My partner Clare does agricultural research in Africa and it's been used in places like that. It's totally appropriate for project." *Photo courtesy of Feedback Farms*
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Remote Sensing -------------- For the next round of techno-farming development, Hallaran says, "The idea would be to use remote sensing techniques to do computer vision processing of the images that come in. How do you sense that there are a lot of tomatoes ready to harvest? One way is to build histograms of your tomato beds at specific time every day. Then you can tell the difference between pale red tomatoes and beds that are loaded with red tomatoes. It would be interesting to work on algorithms that would use that information so you could make a decision as to whether the tomatoes are ripe or not." *Photo courtesy of Feedback Farms*
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Humble Beginnings ----------------- Although Feedback Farm's site is full of lush greenery, that wasn't always the case. The team is working with the owners of unused lots to help keep them well maintained, and clear of trash and vermin. Their efforts are showing success — in 2013, Feedback Farms will expand operations with a second lot a half-mile away from their current Bergen Street strip of land. "We can use technology to manage these dispersed locations and stitch them up into a fabric of farms," he says. "We do that with technology that gives you a heads-up about what's going on at these different lots without having to bike around or take a subway or drive to each site to understand what the priorities are. We still have a ways to go to get there but that's the goal." Meanwhile, Feedback Farms looks forward to a carefully monitored fall harvest of vegetables whose barcoded seedling packets can be identified with wireless radio transmitters.  *Photo courtesy of Feedback Farms*
