Agriculture hasn't fundamentally changed since World War II, when the era of huge scale and vast plenty began. But today's awareness of greenhouse gases, water conservation and food safety and stability call for a rethink. Silicon Valley startup IronOx suggests moving crops indoors, tending them with robots and doing so under the watchful eyes of smart cameras to grow more and better with less worry that the food sustaining us is also slowly killing us.

A team of robots

A robot named Grover moves thousand-pound trays of plants to a photo bay for inspection, a robot called Ada can manipulate individual plants and a robot called Max dispenses just the right amount of water and nutrients to plants brought over based partly on what the cameras noticed. 

"We get a really high resolution scan of all the plants," says David Silver, the company's director of robotics. "This lets us make sure they're growing on track, predict how much we're going to have at harvest and see if an intervention is needed." Interventions can include water, nutrients, light, temperature and humidity -- all part of a closed loop thanks to IronOx growing strictly indoors.

Renewable food

IronOx says the result of all this is "renewable food": Not only do crops deliver consistent quality and yield but residual irrigation water is reused as are any unconsumed nutrients in it. More importantly the company claims that just the right amount of fertilizer is applied in the first place, tightly controlling a farm input that is a major source of methane, perhaps the most potent greenhouse gas. "Fertilizer requires a lot of energy to produce and emits a lot of greenhouse gasses," says SIlver. "The total greenhouse gas emissions of world agriculture is comparable to world transportation. If we want to reduce greenhouse gasses, we have to look at the agriculture sector."