The Farm Hack River of Activity

Great conversation here!

There are a lot of tools out there to facilitate open data sharing, interoperability, etc. Thank you Jeff, Sev, Louis, Dorn, for sharing and pointing to many of them.

And there is an ever increasing amount of data sets for many, many different types of data in the food and agriculture space.

My question is how should the process of establishing an Open Data Standard for Food and Ag work? And how does that process scale?

What types of institutional support are necessary? And what can the Farm Hack community provide to this effort?

What is the precedent put forward by other industries for establishing data standards, both in terms of process and results?

What do we want to emulate and what do we want to leave behind? And how do we accomplish this work?

To understand how the latch works look at the quick hitches on the Land Pride website. Only the bottom links have a latch. The top just a hook. For Canada I suggest contacting the dealers. They should know of a source.

Hi Severine, I am building a human powered tractor that will have three point hitch and pto. What features would you and others like to see on one and what kinds of apllications do you anticipate? With kinds of other equipment can be paierd with it?

Hey Kyle,

I built this for a farm in Shrewsbury, VT so I asked them to answer your questions since they're the one using it now. Answers in-line below:

Was the humidity and temperature relatively consistent on the top shelf vs. bottom? Was there any drastic difference in germination times?

Germination was consistent throughout the chamber...I haven't measured any difference in temperature and humidity from top to bottom, but on a practical level it works great.

How has the heating/water system held up over time? (you mention the galvanic reaction above - is it worth going with stainless?)

It's only been in use for a year, but there haven't been any issues with the materials.

Any other substitutions in materials you would have made in hindsight?

I'm happy with the materials. Some things we learned are that its necessary to cover the seeds more than if they were going to naturally germinate...the high humidity environment can cause the plants to send their roots into the air, rather than the soil. We're going to experiment by partially covering the top of the water reservoir to keep the humidity below 100%. It's also imperative to remove the trays just before germination...in the completely dark environment we've had trays with no sign of germination one evening, and the next morning the cotyledons are over an inch off of the soil on a thin leggy stem.

Hey Dan - Excellent idea here.

In general, I'm wondering how this design worked for you in reliably germinating seedlings? A few specific questions:

Was the humidity and temperature relatively consistent on the top shelf vs. bottom? Was there any drastic difference in germination times? How has the heating/water system held up over time? (you mention the galvanic reaction above - is it worth going with stainless?) Any other substitutions in materials you would have made in hindsight?

Great post!

Hi, Chris.

Yes, I think along the same line as Appropedia... I've been on that site many times.

Here's something I got going, along this line. It's on a fairly obscure web site, but has still had nearly 35,000 views by now... http://www.sufficientself.com/threads/upcycled-repurposed-projects-many.11661/

I think there is great potential for fulfilling needs by using common or stock parts, used & repurposed components, plus ingenuity.

The plumbing heat tape works great and it's safe. Built in thermostat makes it good for this application. This is being used in VA right now so not the coldest temperatures. Would love to see it tested at a colder climate. Report back if you do, please.

Hi there, just following along, I'm about to start a business plan for a shipping container garden so that I'd check this out, but it appears incomplete.

I really recommend the article Gspevak11 shared! Using grasses in pots you can amplify mycorrhizal populations from local soil samples. The benefit being that those species are theoretically better acclimated to your region's conditions. As the grasses grow their fibrous root systems this creates abundant habitat for the mycorrhizae in the soil sample. They proliferate and when the grass senesces the fungi will sporulate making the soil around the roots rich with spores that can be used to inoculate new roots. A useful for inoculant for soil-based mycoremediation projects as well!

http://rodaleinstitute.org/a-complete-how-to-on-farm-am-fungus-inoculum-production/

I did this at home with rye. You can see the fungal hyphae on the soil surface. Cool proof of concept.

I'm getting the drawings and build page ready to post this weekend - thanks, Tim

Hi packplantpath, We also found the supply of the Temper1 USB sensor to be lacking. We started developing the software to support the DHT11 sensor that attaches to the GrovePi. It's all pretty experimental at this point but we could get you a download of the Raspberry Pi software to make it work if you are interested. The Android version was just an idea but not one we've had time to implement. There is the Thermodo sensor, which given the right app, could serve your use case pretty well. Here's a list of some apps that work with Thermodo. Hub could be a candidate but I think it's only for iOS. There is an SDK, so, given enough pizza and soda a developer like me could make an app that does notifications from Android.

Hi all - Sorry I missed the organizers call. I was sick in bed. I hope y'all had a great holiday and I'm looking forward to catching up next Thursday!

\ RJ