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With France potentially facing a shortage of farmers in the decade ahead, a businessman has created an application called Biosphere to help newcomers to the sector grow food using natural methods. And it bears something of a resemblance to a certain 1990s computer game.
Kim Huynh-Kieu is an all-rounder. His surprising career has led his from pharmaceutical sciences to music to computer programming to design. However, it’s the millionaire businessman’s new project “Hectar,” an agricultural school for the farmers of tomorrow opening soon, which is showing much potential right now.
Through contact with new farmers, he came up with Biosphere to help reduce the time, risk and complexity involved in starting out in the sector. This application bears a resemblance to the SimCity computer game, popular in the ’90s, where players could build (or destroy) the city of their dreams by adding factories, crops and more. In the app, a grower can design the market garden of their dreams. And thanks to models of artificial intelligence used by Facebook or eBay, the Biosphere app helps farmers protect their crops from pests (like slugs) and choose the best complementary varieties of fruit and vegetables to plant based on their precise location.
How can Biosphere be useful for new farmers?
TECHNOLOGY
TECHNOLOGY
TECHNOLOGY
There is a problem with food resilience. This problem isn’t new, but it is starting to become critical. Mindful of this are young gardeners or market gardeners who want to work with agroecology techniques, in other words, [in ways that] preserve the planet’s resources. These techniques may be ancestral, but they are completely unknown to these new generations of farmer-gardeners. So, one year ago, we launched Biosphere to help them find solutions, between their needs and nature, to produce food.
You note that these new farmers are also sometimes actually just gardeners.
