CELEBRATING FARMER SCIENTISTS BY BAXTER BELL

At the Jacob Javits Center, I was part of the NY Sun Works press team, and I interviewed five speakers. The speakers I will be focusing on are Yosh, who created an agricultural urban farming assistant, and Aria, Ryan, Dylan, and Irfan who focused on finding the optimal growth environment. 

The first presenter, Yash Gupta from Jose Marti STEM Academy, created an app that helps the health of agricultural farming and it helps keep your farm growing well. Also, the app gives statistics on how well your farm is doing and includes AI to give you feedback. It also has an image reader that sees if your plants are thriving. I think he did really well, and I remember he’s been working on this for over two years. He didn’t do this by himself, he had teachers help. I think it’s a very useful app that can help a lot. I noticed he put in all different types of pipes, lighting, and urban farming layouts, which can help you plan out a new farm or hydroponics lab. The AI helps you figure out how to make changes to your lab so the plants can grow better and more efficient.

The four people Aria, Ryan, Dylan, and Irfan from PS 214, conducted many experiments. Their main focus was to discover how crowding more plants into a smaller space impacts growth. Their method was as follows: They took three identical cups, and they put the exact same amount of water in each of them. The independent variable is that each cup had a different number of clippings of basil. The one with 10 clippings only had a few that grew well; the one with five had similar outcomes; the one with just one clipping had lots of space for the roots to grow and didn’t have to share any of its nutrients so it grew strong and large. 

The optimal growth environment and urban farming assistant will be important for people to know about because lots of hydroponics labs and urban farms have not been doing well. These can help them reboot and do better and grow more efficiently.