Computational Agroecology: Sustainable Food Ecosystem Design
summary
Claims a new field that uses computation to scale site‑specific polycultures that currently exist as backyard and community examples into larger farms; argues industrial agriculture costs 10 fossil‑calories per food calorie and causes runoff dead zones. Proposes four system classes: data, design, implementation, maintenance, uses crowdsourced local knowledge, guided interactive co‑creation, on‑site sensing and simple robotics, and validation via an agroecological Turing test and side‑by‑side yield comparisons to industrial systems.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to talk
- 0:50Food system challenges today
- 3:23What is agroecology
- 5:51Industrial vs agroecological systems
- 7:17Designing complex ecosystems
- 9:05Computational systems for scaling
- 12:18Future directions and Q&A
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