GreenStart's mission is to foster a resilient energy and food system for New Hampshire by providing technical education and practical agricultural examples. An educational non-profit organization established in 2006, GreenStart sees food and fuel security as the end-product of a vibrant, sustainable agriculture system in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire has 40% of its land area in agricultural soils, yet farms only 10% and imports 95% of its food and fuel. New Hampshire has no significant petroleum resources. To feed and fuel itself from sustainable natural resources, New Hampshire must improve its soils while also improving production.
To achieve this end, GreenStart facilitates projects that
1) increase soil carbon “banking”
2) decrease energy inputs
3) increase both food and fuel outputs (positive energy and carbon balance)
4) promote “tight” cycling of nutrients
5) provide opensource access to appropriate knowledge, seeds and equipment
http://store.publiclaboratory.org/collections/spectrometry/products/fold...
It seems that lot of the work is getting these low cost spectrometers calibrated to plant tissue and soil sample analysis. The more robust version is only $40 - http://store.publiclaboratory.org/products/desktop-spectrometry-kit
this is a great way in to start developing open data sharing that is being discussed in this tool wiki
http://farmhack.net/tools/open-farm-data#forum
to start to develop calibration standards and assign some meaning to data coming out of this kind of technology.
There is also this sandboxed tool that tries to get at how to pull in this kind of data and make it useful to farmers and researchers alike.
http://farmhack.net/tools/universal-adaptive-management-software#wiki
Would be great to tie it into this kind of software too
http://farmhack.net/tools/crop-planning-software