dorn

I think this article provides interesting background on workflow and reducing barriers to entry for posting - and is worth considering as we design the next web site improvements and integrate with other partners.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/github/

The unit we ran that was built on the plans is in Brattleborough Vermont. We had it here for the Farm Hack New Hampshire event and tested it on oats and It worked very well. We did not set up the cyclone separator but we used a clipper fanning mill to separate the chaff and we had a product which was clean enough to make oatmeal with. The raw footage is being sent to me next week which should show the unit running and working - but while I track that down I can post some still images I tool before we ran it. The images taken are inside the sheet metal housing mostly show the stator and cylinder with flat fan blades which create airflow to blow out hulled material. The stator blocks a good view of the gap between stator and cylinder. The other photo is of the gate to control flow into the huller.

I think a single row width sweep plow setup would work well. I have found it even works under mulch with a Coulter to cut through first.

I wonder if we might implement a rating on completeness of documentation as a method to keep the barrier to entry low, but also encourage the idea that the aim is for enough information to be shared that anyone could replicate the tool.

There are a lot of tools posted right now with fairly limited descriptions or images. In some cases that may be all that is needed, but I think an open rating system may set expectations for where the community would like to see the documentation move to.

I think that we might also add a note in the tool template that in that it is OK to appeal to the community for help in further documenting tools.

I agree that the ranking should be based on numbers of subscribers/followers- and possibly displayed as a ranking, to give a bit of pride, but without exposing actual numbers or individual subscriber identities directly.

Just came across this - seems like we should look into their model for funding physical proejcts

https://secure.christiestreet.com/about

So many of the next steps we have talked about are around improving the value for the participant in farm hack, which in my mind is access to relevant information and community. One of the values of participating in opensource is as Rob mentions, is access to project capital that would otherwise not be available. This is clearly an area that has a lot of potential to be enhanced on the site through facilitating multiple distributed funding methods - but this is just part of the value. Another value is access to documented ideas and experiences from folks with skilled minds ready to problem solve with you - this is a little more complex because it requires a certain critical mass of people to jump in, and is more fragile because the exchange and value is more based on social relationships and a more nebulas future return which will likely not be directly linked to your own contribution. In academic terms it is "complex reciprocity" - it is like a barn raising. By showing up and contributing, you put yourself on the list when you need a barn raised by the group - it is a sort of informal community contract. As in a barn raising those that make large contributions are recognized by the group but that return can come in many different forms - in learned skills, in shared experience, in good food, and in future connections and idea exchanges.

I, as a farmer, am not interested in developing a tool business, but in improving my farm and I would like to have access to the best tools for a kind of agriculture that has not yet been developed. I see the speculative R&D and manufacturing being a poor fit to rapidly develop adaptive technology that will meet my needs and the needs of the next generation of farms and farmers needs. In my view, anytime there is a license involved, it puts up a road block to expanding on that bit of insight, which will slow down innovation (think apple/samsung). The music industry and sampling controversy is the most common example, but there are so many examples (patent trolls in computer hardware and software making a fortune by producing no value but instead creating a toll in road of common progress).

Fashion is the most public example of a billion dollar industry based on no design protection. Anyone can copy anyone else and they do - that is why the brand identity is so important. It identifies quality craftsmanship, or other qualities that are built on trust (maybe not the best industry to emulate, but you get my point). However, what you see in fashion is constant churn of designs and rapid adaptation to changing markets. I think this characteristic fits adaptive direct market agriculture much better than the model on the other end of the spectrum of living on royalties based on unchanging work done decades before.

As Lois and I have talked about a lot, there are clearly revenue models in opensource hardware (and software), but they are different revenue models based on service and skills transfer rather than knowledge protection. By sharing development risk, we can also reduce the amount that we each need to recover back from a project in order to move on to the next project, and instead of looking to recover a large development cost, we can focus on marketing our products and skills. Even Wikipedia now has professionals making a living - not by licensed content or ads, but by writing and maintaining really good entries for third parties.

Our project is a little different than wikipedia, but I believe not as different as we would think. I think we tend to dwell in our discussions on a very narrow set of projects that are expensive to prototype and require specialized fabrication skills. That is why I was so interested in the french FarmFab concept http://www.adabio-autoconstruction.org. They have an entirely separate program around fabrication skills that is much more like vocational training- with traveling trucks with equipment that can show up at a farm to do a build of a previously set design. When I was doing the weekend biodiesel workshops with Girl Mark, she would charge for the weekend and people would bring their own materials etc. SO the knowledge was free and open source, but Girl Mark's time was compensated for - (and those projects required low skill levels and few special tools). These two models might be something we could build on. I think we would do well to separate the skill development track from the documentation and design work. I think this would enable us to focus on the social and online process of designing and sharing things that are easy to share electronically and socially first (photos, software code, parts sourcing, 3d components, skills videos, shared experiences, approaches, food etc.)

There is certainly demand for fabrication skills development but by developing a separate track for projects that require it, we might be able to move faster on other projects. Not everything on farmhack will require machining and metalwork - but it is easy to dwell on it as a barrier. The fabrication skills development track and lowering the cost of access to tools- like mobile setups, coops, fablabs, partnerships with schools etc. could then continue as an objective but not a road block. I don't think this would be an abandonment of our current work, but rather a refinement that would also help clarify and define what "farm hack" events are all about (builds, skills, or designs, or documentation, and how they all relate to one another).

I would recommend looking at the roller crimper tool page. I will see if I can attach this forum post to it. The primary issue with the cimper with mixed covercrops is getting them to flower close enough to each other so that they will kill when they are rolled. If some are too far along they will produce viable seed, and others that are not mature enough may still have enough root energy to recover. If your roller is the standard I&J model based on the rodale design, you will want to make sure that your fall seedbed prep is very good. Because the roller is rigid, if the ground is anything but flat, it will ride up on ridges and miss hollows - which results in sections missing crimps.

One of the developments I would like to see on farm hack is to develop a sectional roller that will follow ground contours and apply even ground pressure. Charles Martin in PA has addressed this with a roller mounted between the rows on a no-till corn planter which also has the advantage of seeding into a standing crop, rather than having to set the planter up to work through the rolled mulch.

Hairy vetch is a great cover crop to mulch and provides wonderful weed supression while it is growing, but decomposes very rapidly. If there are perennial grasses, they will push through the vetch mat by mid July (if the vetch was killed mid june). Winter rye on the other hand - if planted at 140lbs/acre or more in good fertile soil (sometimes growing up to 7' tall), will provide a heavy mat of many inches that will not decompose significantly until the following season. I have had good luck last season planting crimson clover and winter rye together and having them bloom together in the spring. Since crimson clover is an annual, it also kills easily when flowering. I have used it as a mix this year with rye, and with winter wheat and winter barley.

I have not done the rye vetch mixture for crimping in the past because the bloom dates have not been coordinated - and vetch in general has been harder to kill with a crimp until a little after full flower and seed pods start to show. However, I found on our farm that a disk harrow set without offset, or a no-till drill run over the vetch is far more effective in killing the vetch and can work several weeks earlier than the crimper. This season I am going back to planting a rye vetch mix again for crimping with this more aggressive method for killing the vetch - with the hope that the viney vetch will pull down the rye enough to be crimped with the disks of the no-till drill.

There is so much to learn and experiment with in these approaches. I really look forward to hearing about your experiences.

Here is the link to the RSVP

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFBOYjM4Y2dMeTc2T1Z...

That is great news. Please take and post pictures (or any CAD drawings) of the process and any issues you may encounter, and list yourself as a fabricator for this tool if you would like to. I wouldn't be surprised if others would be interested in ordering. For image size, If you click on the images - on the lower right corner you can click to expand the image to fill the screen. You can also click "edit wiki" to access the image source and click to open the image in a new tab or window. You should then be able to download or print from that. If that doesn't work, let me know. I will also post a suggestion to make it easier to download images for printing.