May 29, 2009

Carrots might not scream when pulled from the ground,

but new technology is giving vegetables a voice in how they are raised.

Microchipped plants can now send text messages to a farmer's cell phone

and ask for water.

"It's akin to a clip on earring, very thin and smaller than a postage stamp,

and is affixed to the plant leaf," said Richard Stoner, President of

AgriHouse, a company marketing the technology.

"The farmer would just need their regular cell phone service, and the plant

would send a text message when it needed water."

For areas that receive regular and plentiful rainfall, such detailed crop

monitoring might not be useful or economical. But in the western United

States, where much of the water comes from underground aquifers,

conserving water, and more importantly, conserving the electricity that

pumps it to the surface and across fields, could save farmers hundreds of

thousands of dollars each year.

Water in the open spaces of the west is valuable, but it's virtually worth

its weight in gold in outer space. The original cell phone for plants was

developed years ago by scientists working with NASA on future manned

missions to the moon and Mars.

"You need plants on future space missions," said Hans-Dieter Seelig, a

scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who worked on the

original NASA project