Cultivating the Future: Using AI to Grow Plants – Arkansas Tech University

A project by the Arkansas Tech University Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences (MANRRS) student organization is bringing a vegetable garden to an unexpected location: a reception area inside ATU’s Dean Hall.

There, adjacent to faculty offices for the ATU agriculture program, is an artificial intelligence-guided Gardyn growing station. Small cups of seeds for plants such as basil, chamomile, green and red mustard, romaine lettuce, sweet peppers, cilantro and stevia are loaded onto the station.

Through a combination of artificial light, water and artificial intelligence, the Gardyn and the ATU students working with it will nurture those seeds into full-grown plants.

“It’s really cool, especially with the AI aspect of it…I really like that,” said Hannah Pigee of Jonesboro, an ATU agriculture student and member of ATU MANRRS. “It furthers our education because we can see the plants grow in real time. I like the fact that you can have all these different types of plants growing together, and it wasn’t hard to set up. I can promise you that I thought we were going to struggle when we were told we were going to have to build something, but it was really easy to put together. I can’t wait to see all the plants grow, especially if we’re able to taste test them for ourselves later.”

Gardyn was founded by FX Rouxel in collaboration with McGill University in Canada. According to information provided by the company, Gardyn’s indoor growing systems use 95 percent less water than traditional gardening methods and create almost no waste. The seeds are untreated, non-GMO and sourced organically from small farms in the United States when possible.

Time Magazine named Gardyn one of its best inventions of the year in 2020.

The process of bringing a Gardyn unit to ATU began when Dr. Tatum Simms, ATU assistant professor of agriculture, reached out to the company and met with its chief financial officer, Quazi Khaled. As a result of their conversations, Gardyn donated the unit to Arkansas Tech.

Simms and two of her ATU agriculture faculty colleagues — Dr. Justin Killingsworth and Dr. Syed Meerza — are working on grant funding that would make it possible for ATU to provide Gardyn systems to as many as eight high schools around the State of Arkansas.

“Agriculture is not just about labor-intensive work out in the field under the hot sun, as is the view of most of our under-represented minority students and their families,” said Simms. “As a result, they shy away from careers in agriculture. There’s a lot of technology that goes into agriculture. Hopefully we are able to get more students aware of that and interested in learning more. There are a lot of different careers that blend agriculture and technology they can pursue. They are the future. They are the ones who will develop more advanced agricultural technologies in the future. Hence the reason we want to expose our students to these technologies early.”

Learn more about Gardyn at https://mygardyn.com.

Learn more about the ATU agriculture program at www.atu.edu/agriculture.

View more photos at https://atu.photoshelter.com/galleries/C000016Jjplr58Z4/G00000iS55jg1N_k/I0000jErqJTEL_Wg/2C3A3071-jpg.