Microsoft's Hydroponics Program

[GuerrillaRed]

I just got back from a cool conference where one of the main topics was Microsoft's hydroponic program and I got an opportunity to speak with the head of Microsoft's hydroponics/urban farming project. My mind was blown and I'm sitting here trying to process it all.

First of all, I have to say Microsoft's technology didn't impress me. I'd even go so far as to say I feel the ingenuity and technology being used by connoisseur growers is ahead of Microsoft's game. Pretty standard LED and aeroponics set up. It was super cool but waaayyyy overpriced without a lot of room to improvise.

For instance their germination/early veg cabinets had four racks with I think about 8 T-5s above each shelf, standard computer/exhaust fans on each side for each level and standard trays and I was told each cabinet costs $8800-9000.

Their "hydroponics" set up was really a standard aeroponics tower with three led rows encased in glass. Quite honestly, I wasn't that impressed with it. But then again, they're trying to grow food and I'm trying to grow the best weed possible so maybe I just didn't appreciate it correctly.

But the interesting thing was hearing their marketing strategy and what they plan to do with hydroponics. They're investing heavily in urban farming, organic hydro and it looks like they're going to make a major push into the farming industry and try to restructure it.

The coolest thing was to talk to the lady who runs the program. Really cool neat person who is a huge nerd on unconventional gardening methods. It was really pleasant to have a conversation with a great mind on something virtually no one in my real life has any clue of. I feel a lot of negativity about Microsoft but this lady was super cool.

I have a lot of concerns about Microsoft trying to go into the farming and hydroponics industry. It seems to me the days of innovation and a loose guerrilla culture and community of us growers are numbered. I also think its naive to think Microsoft won't try to rape both industries like it did the computer industry. But all of this is at an experimental stage and intensely interesting to see first hand what the most powerful corporation in the world is doing with our hobby/business.

Also I had to chuckle at the name of the company of the free sample seeds they were giving out.

 

[snake11]

Maybe they should try to get windows to work right before they expand into new products.

 

[CodeGreen99]

Sounds like a pretty cool day.

A lot of the big players are researching urban farming right now because they know that the population of the Earth is growing exponentially. They like to envision these mega towers housing who knows how many people, and each building grows it's own food for the people that live there.

You see that in research projects like the one at MIT

The future of global food production will mandate a paradigm shift from traditional practice to resource leveraged and environmentally optimized urban food growing solutions. The MIT CityFARM is an anti-disciplinary group of engineers, architects, urban planners, economists and plant scientists exploring and developing of high performance urban agricultural systems.

http://mitcityfarm.media.mit.edu/

I don't know much about Microsoft's interests in farming, but myself (and a ton of other software developers) are really impressed with Microsoft right now. They are making pretty amazing (for MS anyway) efforts to embrace open source software. They have a new CEO, a new corporate culture, talented and open minded people in key positions, and they are doing things that Microsoft would have never dreamed of doing 10 years ago. It feels like a really a different company at the moment, but we'll see what happens down the road

 

[GuerrillaRed]

Yup

 

[floralheart]

welcome to hooli

 

[resinryder]

High Mowing seeds have been around a long time. Been buying them for years

 

[snuggles]

interesting, and thanks for the pics!
greets

 

[GuerrillaRed]

Something I forgot to mention, Microsoft seems to be going big into plasma lighting. The head of the program was saying she sees that as the future as a lot of our conversation was about the economic differences between hydro and conventional farming. She definitely convinced me to research plasma lighting as I know next to nothing about it.

One of the Microsoft people said I could come back for a private tour later this week and see their labs and actual work as these were just demos today. I have to say this was one of the neater experiences I've had. Even I didn't realize how much of a nerd I am about this stuff until I had the opportunity to see this stuff up close and talk to smart people about it.

To expand on Microsoft's farming strategy, they're trying implement something called the "Ingredient Revolution" where they work with small local organic farms to bring food to market. To me it was reminiscent of the wine industry and their wanting the food industry to be like that. Personally it sounded like real hoyty toyty bullshit with no hope of ever being economically viable. But it could be a cool thing that Microsoft is investing money and hiring top brains in the field.

If you guys have any questions you want me to ask or anything you want to know, let me know and I'll report back.

Another amusing thing about the convention is I swear to god, half of the Microsoft tech either didn't work or was fucking up.

 

[paulo73]

Nice one.
Are you going for that private tour? I hope you do.
Even if this is just too much about nothing i´m already having my morning "pipe dream" where all PC´s would come with a "Grow Your Own" software that collected tech tools,info and users that wished to grow their own vegs on their own properties. No matter size, location or environment. Providing a very wide range of solutions for all kinds of practical issues that us growers have to deal with.

Again this is probably just another pipe dream of mine, anyway thanks for sharing.

 

[420somewhere]

Way cool

 

[dddaver]

I do think that technology is very cool and also very necessary. I kinda hate to write this because mostly I just wanna say thank-you for this. But I just gotta add a word of caution too.

ANYTHING MS is connected to must be, and always will be, looked at with caution/disdain. "History will just repeat itself unless we learn from it". They may come off as wanting to better mankind, but the reality is that their real motivation is to conquer/surround/change and thereby become the leader in the future of farming. So in this capitalist economy in the US, get they would just get even MORE rich. $$$$ every-time. Money rules in the US.

Again, I hate to be Debbie Downer because I do think this technology is very cool and very needed. But that company ruined a lot of good things and bull-dozed of good people and stepped on a lot of toes. And that distrust will never be forgotten. And shouldn't be either.

Linux rulez. Same thing will happen with this.

 

[LEF]

Maybe they should try to get windows to work right before they expand into new products.

I think the fact that windows is made that way advantages them, i think if they really wanted for it to be smooth it would be. Sort of how companies make products that dont last long.

 

[WelderDan]

And the whole shebang plugs into the Interwebs and you can change the environment and observe your garden from your job with your Microsoft tablet. Until the 14 year old neighbor kid hacks it with his iPhone and changes the lighting schedule and nutrient values.

I'm with dddaver on this. It's cool, it's inevitable, but it's Microshaft we're talking about here. But it will at least have a fuggin USB port, unlike the iPharm version.

 

[GuerrillaRed]

I agree with you guys, I really dislike Microsoft. The entire time on the Microsoft campus, I was hoarding metal spoons in case I had to tunnel out of there.

There does seem to be a sinister underlying plot to this. The cool people working on the program seem to be the naïve do-gooders who are so wrapped up in the details of their obsession that they may be missing the bigger picture. Letting an evil corporation like Microsoft that has floundered in the computer innovation department for the last two decades while controlling it through nefarious tactics enter the food industry is concerning at least. However it doesn't seem possible for their strategy to be anything more than a short lived gimmick for rich people. Also if a big corporation wants to throw a bunch of money at different brains at the field to do research and work in their field, I don't have a problem with that.

 

[floralheart]

There does seem to be a sinister underlying plot to this. The cool people working on the program seem to be the naïve do-gooders who are so wrapped up in the details of their obsession that they may be missing the bigger picture.

Nerds.

Ogre was our saviour.

 

[CodeGreen99]

Throughout my career I've have always been a big supporter of open source software, and so I've never been much of a fan of Microsoft either because they spent decades fighting against that effort, and became pretty rich in the process. Bill Gates is certainly not hurting for money.

I have been forced to work with their tech in the past because it's really not up to me, it's usually what the client wants, and what your boss tells you that you are going to build. Not much you can do about that.

With the new CEO though they are really trying to pretty hard to re-brand themselves as the "New Microsoft". They have had a some pretty big failures in key markets recently (especially mobile), and they realized that the old model isn't working for them any more, and if they want to maintain their position in the market something has to change.

So now you see them doing all kinds of crazy things you wouldn't expect from them ....

They finally released versions of office for iOS and Android devices, something they refused to do for years, and then they gave it away for free.

Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for the first year if you already own Win 7, 8, 8.1. That was a pretty big shocker right there. But they want to try to get everyone on the same windows platform because there is new stuff coming down the pipeline that will need to run on Windows 10 i'd imagine.

Now they are open sourcing the .NET platform which means that for the first time we'll be able to build applications using their technology stack that run on Linux and Mac boxes (without using 3rd party tools like mono). In the past if you wanted to build an ASP.NET app it was going to have to run on a Windows server and that meant paying M$.

They now have a free version of Visual Studio for small teams. It's a very expensive piece of software, and one of the big reasons people would look to alternative programming languages.

So yeah I know this all boring shit to most people, but my point is under this new guy they doing lots of things that Gates and Blamer would have never done. They have their billions already though.

But I remain pretty skeptical just like anyone else. I'm waiting to see how it all pans out.

Honestly, my big hope for this is actually being successful is that I REALLY love working with C#. It's a beautiful programming language for enterprise level development after being trapped using Java for many years

Concerning farming? They aren't really saying anything that a dozen other companies haven't already said.

I do know this though ... I would take a tech company like Microsoft working on this stuff over the alternative ...The alternative being companies like Monsanto who you know for a fact are balls deep in this game, and those guys are in it to win it.

Anyway, sorry for my rambling ...

 

[stoned-trout]

I like lettuce,,,got nothing against Microsoft either....yeehaw ..looks like a mesclun blend

 

[blastfrompast]

Like I tell my homesteading friends who want to garden indoors.... Look to the pot forums..... 9k a cabinet....holy Rippoff.

 

[GuerrillaRed]

Like I tell my homesteading friends who want to garden indoors.... Look to the pot forums..... 9k a cabinet....holy Rippoff.

SERIOUSLY! As a kid who grew up making poor man's teks I found on various forums, I was almost offended by that germ/veg cab. I virtually guarantee you just all the good growers on here could make the exact same thing in a couple of hours for under $500.

The Aeroponics chamber was super cool no doubt. But it must have cost ten times its worth with really limited options.

I couldn't really get a straight answer on where these things came from and where this pricing came from. But someone has one hell of a racket going.