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
Thank you for the offer of translation. I need to order a copy of the book myself. Based on some recent conversations, The ADABio folks were happy to have us post other designs as well - It would be great if you are able to translate and share any of the other designs you think would be useful to the community.
One of the issues it seems is translating the metric to standard steel stock dimensions. I have heard from another farmer that they have already built a version using standard stock, and am waiting to get the design from them to post. Another option would be finding a good supplier of metric steel for the C channel and square tube stock. It would be great to have them be cross compatible. It would also be good to know if the Jiffy hitch is cross compatible with the ADABio design.
Here is a link to a video about the jiffy hitch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID5xjHvT7qs and a link the the web site
http://www.jiffyhitchsystems.com/index.php/jiffyhitchesmenu
I gave them a call and got current pricing
Female Cat I $331- Ca I HD $337 - cat II $ 459 cat II HD $524
male Cat I $637 - Cat II $736 Cat IIHD $824
The delta hook does not look to be compatible with this design http://www.deltahook.com/
I don't know if I will make my own male side, but compared with the work in a normal three point implement, a manual process of locking the top seems fairly easy and still avoids many of the safety issues involved with hitching up 3 point implements. I think from the open source perspective It would be terrific to build one to study and hopefully improve.