The Farm Hack River of Activity

Stream of Forum Topics

In 50 characters or less... Posted by Post date Last comment Number of Comments # of Comments new to you
Best medium for growing in aquaponics or soil based medium Trip3980 Friday, April 18, 2014 - 4:52pm Friday, April 18, 2014 - 4:52pm 0
Open Source Seed Initiative launched today R.J. Steinert Thursday, April 17, 2014 - 12:50pm Thursday, April 17, 2014 - 12:50pm 0
Quick Attach + PTO! Francis4344 Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 3:34pm Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 3:34pm 0
The Ultimate Eggmobile jennajane Monday, April 14, 2014 - 8:42pm Wednesday, April 16, 2014 - 9:37am 3
One-Time Price Variations Bill Thursday, April 10, 2014 - 5:07pm Thursday, April 10, 2014 - 5:07pm 0
Labor Cost Calculator Bill Thursday, April 10, 2014 - 5:05pm Thursday, April 10, 2014 - 5:05pm 0
Paper Records Templates Bill Thursday, April 10, 2014 - 4:57pm Thursday, April 10, 2014 - 4:57pm 0
Open Food Network Distribution Model (in BETA) nordic_lion Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - 1:20pm Tuesday, January 2, 2018 - 4:29am 1
[Question] Application imagery on water management farming albertus.aw Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - 9:33am Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - 12:23pm 1
Which Crops / Varieties To Track? Bill Monday, April 7, 2014 - 12:37pm Monday, April 7, 2014 - 12:37pm 0

Stream of Forum Comments

DGrover's picture

Here are two drawings Donn did of two components of this tractor conversion. These are his preliminary ideas of how these two pieces might work.

RegRooAnne's picture

Hello all,

My experience with appropriate technologies lies more with earthen building and basic water filtration techniques than tractors, but I am excited to learn about hacks of all kinds and contribute where I can. We would like to move in the direction of investing in draft power (most likely horses) as we scale up, so I'd love to connect with folks who have an interest in that…

dorn's picture

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.

danpaluska's picture

this sounds great! if my schedule allows i will most definitely be there.

Seag1508's picture

Has anyone ever heard of the advantages of copper tools for soil or the Viktor Schauberger "golden plough" design to conserve top soil. http://www.scene.org/~esa/search/schauberger/ http://www.zachariel.nl/english/zachschauberger.htm

Seag1508's picture

My name is Ian seager, Im from Lansing and I will need to head home on saturday night and drive back out sunday morning. I have a car, it's old so it might be nice to have a more fuel efficient ride but I can prvide rides as well, I have a van. Call me at (517)643-3207 or email seageria@msu.edu

jennajane's picture

Hi, I started farming last year in Quebec, Canada and had a big year. I am the founding member of a cooperative farm with 2 other women. I am in charge of machinery and infrastructure here on the farm (among other things). Last year I led the building of a 3000sqft greenhouse, a veggie wash station, a 140 sqft cold room powered by 2 cool bots, a 150 sqft chicken coop and purchased $12k in machinery. I am hoping this year is a bit slower, but have dreams of buying/building a bit more equipment, a bed former, a toolbar with sweeps, building a pedal-powered root washer, and a pedal-powered salad spinner. I am interested in Arduino based projects to control things all over the farm, but especially in the greenhouse.

We run an certified organic CSA, and currently have about 40 laying hens, and raised 2 veal cows last year. We do a 19 week summer season and a 14 week winter season. We are La ferme cooperative aux champs qui chantent (Singing Fields Cooperative Farm).

cghdixon's picture

Hi, A "non-farmer ally' here - an educator and ed researcher who has been involved with ag stuff, bikes, and community organizations over the last handful of years. Am replanting my garden rows in Oakland, CA, and listening in, looking for opportunity to lend a hand. Hope I can find a way to contribute - helping get people together, linking up human and financial resources, develop ideas... just thinking alongside everyone.

dorn's picture

Great to see your post - Our farm has started to parch/roast sweet corn and flint corn for corn meal and were thinking about having a local coffee roaster do it, but I think that this would be a great project for the farm hack community. I think if the root washer setup with a steel mesh screen instead of wood slats were combined with the flame weeder setup - including the ignition module that is posted that it would probably be a fairly efficient setup. The pedal power setup is here
http://www.farmhack.net/tools/low-cost-pedalpower-rootwasher (link is external)
The ignition module here
http://www.farmhack.net/tools/electronic-flame-weeder-ignitionelectronic... (link is external)

Here are a couple other posts from the beer brewing communities - the images are attached.
http://www.heydenrych.info/grain_roaster.html (link is external)
http://thebrewingnetwork.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3019 (link is external)
and from coffee roasting

http://www.costa-rica-mountain-property.com/Mountain_Coffee.html (link is external)

dorn's picture

After copying several articles from sections of scanned text that had some strange formatting - I found a couple techniques that help. If the test is oddly spaced - whole sections can be pasted into the subject line of an e-mail to remove the formatting. It can then be pasted and edited more easily. Other ways of doing this?

I also found that if there are two columns that are not in a separate text box that if they are pasted into word, highlighted and a table inserted that the columns will separate and the text from each can be copied and pasted properly.

dorn's picture

It is super important to get feedback -and great to see your first forum post! is navigating to particular tools or forums the primary challenge or is it editing and starting new tools, forums etc?

Under the tools tab, there is an instructional video about how to use the farmhack site.

http://www.farmhack.net/tools/online-farm-hack-tools (link is external)

If you have particular suggestions etc. that would be a great place to post a comment.

green tractor farm's picture

Definitely, which opens up another question, what is the ideal weight overall in terms of balancing traction and effort? Maybe an elliptical sprocket too, oriented the way Sheldon Brown advised - http://sheldonbrown.com/biopace.html

dorn's picture

Here is a link to the table of contents and an article (preface for book)

http://www.farmhack.net/tools/encyclopedia-practical-farm-knowledge#wiki (link is external)

dorn's picture

What about sandboxing all the internal chapters/articles and just publishing the main table of contents as a regular tool - with each article linking to a sandboxed tool? That should work right? Then the navigation is from a main tool page to the articles - but the articles will then still have forums and no coding needed.

R.J. Steinert's picture

Woohoo! I see their robot hasn't converted it into any other format yet. It may be because it's a huge file or it may be because it's in Word format. Let's give the robot a day or so to see if it can work its magic on that file.

dorn's picture
dorn's picture

I posted a wiki to capture FarmHack design principles. I am sure several of these could be consolidated and articulated further - It would be great to also link to examples of each criteria in use with FarmHack tools and to reference them as we document our tools and design choices.

Here is the link to the building design principles wiki http://www.farmhack.net/wiki/design-principles-farmhack (link is external)

A good similar discussion can be found here http://www.openstructures.net/pages/2#vraag-1a (link is external)

and here http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/12/how-to-make-everything-ourselves-... (link is external)

dorn's picture

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.

R.J. Steinert's picture

No idea yet. I've only seen the file on your computer once or twice. I'll need to look through the file to think about how we should structure a digital copy of it. In case you didn't know, anyone can add a document to the Community Texts (link is external) section on Archive.org, no approval process required.

dorn's picture

Any comments on forum wiki structure? - would it be hard to add forum links to floating wikis as a method to comment on articles?

R.J. Steinert's picture

Hosting the file on Archive.org is a good idea. They'll convert it into many different formats and give us a reader that we can embed on a Farm Hack wiki page. I've actually been building things with their API and communicating directly with one of their developers lately so building some kind of Farm Hack / Archive.org integration is in the cards. I'll keep thinking about it. I'm also thinking about ways we might be able to automate a conversion of this book into Markdown format. In Markdown format we could host in on GitHub and/or the Farm Hack wiki pages. For an example of markdown being used on GitHub, check out this README.md (link is external) file. Because I gave the extension .md, GitHub converts the Markdown formatted text into HTML. You can click on Raw (link is external) to see the Markdown source of the HTML.

Let's definitely get that document on A.o for starters. Then, if I can't figure out how to convert one of the formats that A.o converts to, I'll figure out an efficient manual workflow that we can then divvy up to some volunteers.

DGrover's picture

As farmhack moves forward, different kinds of events are appropriate for different groups in different places. We should think of design charrettes, showcases, social events, build days, etc. as tools which the designers of a specific farm hack event should employ to accomplish the goals of a specific hacking event.

zepickens's picture

I've numbers that say passive venting requires an area 20% of your square footage to be open during the day. So if I have 200 sq ft of growing space, I would have to have 40 sq ft of vents, which is a lot. I think these would be awesome for the air intake portion of the system. Now I just need to figure out the exhaust side of things.

kate.wildwoodsfarm's picture

Learn to Farm at The Farming Institute

michaeljamesmeier's picture

Thanks, Adam. A bit out of our price range for full deployment, but worth considering for other growers in similar environments.

zepickens's picture

We're going to be working on a similar hack for this greenhouse with FarmhackNYC: http://www.farmhack.net/tools/solar-powered-greenhouse-ventilation#wiki

Maybe using the FIDO alert system...

zepickens's picture

Thanks for the input, gentlemen. I was doing some rough calculations (based on the U. Mizz site), and I determined I'd need about 1,000 gallons of water to keep the temperature up through the winter. So that would be about 18 55-gallon drums. And yes, jbd, water weight would normally be an issue for a roof, but our roof happens to be concrete-finished and reinforced--overbuilt to say the least. Good for me as a gardener... I did add about 100 gallons of water in various buckets/containers, etc but haven't noticed any real temperature changes.

An Orange County, NY farmer recommended using drums of water as props for planting benches, thus using the space the drums are taking up to my advantage. I would have to pull up the planting beds and source the barrels, which is more work than I can put in right now. But it's definitely on my mind.

One other point, another farmer in Saratoga Springs, who is dealing with the cold a lot more than us, said water could be HARMFUL in the winter if it ends up freezing. He said if it freezes, it might end up radiating colder temperatures than the air. It takes a lot of energy to thaw the water out, so the water may be staying colder longer than the air. Just a thought, but I'm definitely game for experimentation.

R.J. Steinert's picture

Here's the link to the event -> http://nofavt.org/annual-events/winter-conference

dorn's picture

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.

Woodssj's picture

Some of you are looking for threshing and winnowing machines? Look here!The book entry is free online, public domain. It will give you everything you need to figure these systems out. Below is my poor description I used to give the general idea to a curious visitor a long time ago.

  1. Sproule, John. A Treatise on Agriculture (Dublin, Ireland: 1842) books.google.com (accessed 20121206) pp 92.

Plans: The winnowing machine first developed in China several thousand years ago is remarkably simple, consisting of a funnel, two vents, a fan and a crank in a very basic housing. Soon after its introduction to the western world in the late 18th century it was widely adopted as far more efficient than the basket-and-paddle methods commonly used in the rest of the world since the dawn of agriculture. The design is, in fact, so simple that a description alone should be sufficient for a clever man to replicate the machine. Inside a box about 5 feet long, one foot deep and three feet tall at one end is a vent on the bottom right. Inside on the right end is a paddle-type fan powered by a crank extending outside the case. Inside is a baffle to funnel the wind generated toward a vent opposite that described. Another set of baffles on the left of the machine leads grain and chaff from a funnel on top through a chute which ends just above the left side vent. Another funnel extends out the bottom of the machine below the grain chute, and allows the heavier grain to be collected, while the chaff is blown out the side vent during operation. The entire machine is made of wood, and as simply as possible. It can be mounted on legs for convenience of operation or built into a barn or granary wall.