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
How do you deck it? sgbotsford Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - 10:40am Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - 1:34pm 1
Plant Growth Regulators (aka Hormones) massspectrum Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 6:52pm Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 6:52pm 0
Grazers "kit" for fido/apitronics dorn Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 5:13pm Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 9:22pm 1
Open Source Farm Robotics adlard.matthew Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 12:09pm Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - 5:43am 3
Tractors with ground drive PTO? chandler Sunday, February 23, 2014 - 5:33pm Monday, February 24, 2014 - 1:02pm 2
Email bug on FarmHack.net fixed! Check your spam box. Future mail will end up in your inbox. R.J. Steinert Sunday, February 23, 2014 - 3:38pm Sunday, February 23, 2014 - 3:38pm 0
Alternate metric conversion works great! Reid_in_QC Saturday, February 22, 2014 - 4:15pm Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - 9:54pm 1
Irrigation rbsourdough Saturday, February 22, 2014 - 6:12am Saturday, February 22, 2014 - 6:12am 0
Discuss possible platform collaboration? m.stenta Friday, February 21, 2014 - 3:17pm Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 8:28pm 2
Status Aidan Williamson Thursday, February 20, 2014 - 5:38pm Friday, February 21, 2014 - 8:06pm 5

Stream of Forum Comments

Albert Rogers's picture

No problem, it can live at our house until then- you are welcome to stay with us any time. Just let us know if you need it sooner. My brother also lives in Boston, so it might make its way to you via him.

Albert Rogers's picture

Dorn, did you get my latest model to display in Meshlab? I tried it for the first time, and the gray model displays but I can't figure out how to make it display the texture map.

Albert Rogers's picture

where we incorporate predictive modeling into the management of a greenhouse. I'll write up more on this in an idea post on the Fido forum sometime soon.

Albert Rogers's picture

It seemed like a great combination of backgrounds and interests. I look forward to participating with this group more often.

Albert Rogers's picture

John Steward here at Maple Rock Farm on Orcas Island located in the San Juans of Washington state. We area 5 acre market / CSA farm.

Louis's picture

An Arduino could definitely be used to do something along these lines. The trick is figuring out how to sense the depth of your tank. Here's one of the first google results I came across (link is external) which uses pressure sensors.

Then you have to find a way to get the 5V Arduino to actuate your pumps... Relays and such will probably be needed.

Sounds like you wouldn't require an SMS alarm system so you could make a cheaper and more simple system fairly easily. If you wanted to add an alarm though, following the Fido tutorial related to the phone may help.

If you don't know much about Arduinos or electronics, don't worry - it's easy to get started. Adafruit (link is external) has a great learning system.

AndyF's picture

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=fr&to=en&a=http%3A%2F%2Fgrenouille34730.fr%2FCommander.html - link to french company which produces device with irrigation functionality similar to what is described by Louis in the project scope. Price per node ~250EUR.

dorn's picture

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.

Gail's picture

I was wondering if this would work for a livestock watering system? I am using solar power to run a Grunphos pump. Battery backup is to expensive, so i have a generator i use on cloudy days. I want a way for the Water tank to signal when it is low(this would have to be lower than when it normally kicks on) and a way for the generator to turn itself on, fill the tank, and shut itself off.

jbd's picture

I did some more calculations, and it looks like we'll need about a 2GHz chip to get resolution less than 1 foot. Probably faster. I just want to get the proof-of-concept working, then we can attach the radio to an ASIC or something for higher resolution.

Kristen Loria's picture

IF YOU ARE PLANNING TO CAMP AT ECOVILLAGE FRIDAY NIGHT - You will need to call Devon Van Noble (727-410-4073) from Groundswell to tell him when you will be arriving. He will be there friday evening to help people find the camping spot. It's fine to call him on Friday, preferably with a little heads up. It may rain friday evening, so don't forget your tarps.

Louis's picture

RJ and I will be getting in late (11pm or midnight) on Friday night. Two questions:

1) Anybody care to host us? We'll have sleeping pads and sleeping bags so a floor indoors would be fantastic! Email me: thiery.louis@gmail.com (link sends e-mail)

2) If not, how does the Ecovillage camping work? Is there a contact person for that?

brshute's picture

If anyone has a place where I can roll out my sleeping bag in Ithaca on Saturday night, please get in touch at ben@heartyroots.com (link sends e-mail). Thanks! --Ben Shute, Hearty Roots Community Farm + Farm Hack organizer

rachelatNOFANY's picture

I found a place! I recommend using this board :). See everyone this weekend--Rachel

Timothy Weber's picture

No, we abandoned it due to too much competition. The competition didn't necessarily get it right either, though. We applied for an NSF SBIR grant, but were turned down, then found and lost venture capital, then I considered taking it open source, but decided it would take way more time than I could afford to donate, especially since there seemed to be a lot of efforts going already in both academia and industry. That was around 2005.

Louis's picture

Sounds intriguing! I would love to hear about it. Is any documentation still up?

Silas Blevins's picture

How about a rot resistant local wood like white oak or locust? White pine heartwood is pretty good. Cedar is very good. Using a hardwood would increase cost and weight, but would reduce wear issues from the grit/tumbling parts. Maybe a periodic replacement is part of the design. We've got wood.

gurjeet (link is external)

Timothy Weber's picture

Thanks so much! I need to work out child care arrangements for that day, so I'll get back to you privately - hope to have a plan this weekend.

Devon Van Noble's picture

Hey Timothy,

I would love to give you a ride up on Saturday morning, but I will be heading up very early. would you want to come up and help me set up around 8am?

Best, Devon

Timothy Weber's picture

I worked on an open irrigation control project some years ago, when ZigBee wasn't quite done yet; I built a solar-powered node and ran it for several years, but the overall project got derailed in politics. Would be happy to chat about it.

Timothy Weber's picture

I'm a non-driver living in Fall Creek [downtown Ithaca] and would love to hitch a ride up to EcoVillage for the event on Saturday, and back.

bb123's picture

Hi Everybody, I'm an international research networker (no really, that's my job title) based right now in Switzerland. I grew up on a small family farm in Western New York and have worked in agriculture my whole life. Right now I'm working on an article about farmer driven innovation for Ecology & Farming magazine and would like to share some information and photos from Farm Hack events.

I am also working on a project with NOFA-NY to develop value added small grains for farmers interested in marketing locally. I'm interested in working on designs used for on-farm dehulling, cleaning and milling for on-farm micro- and mini-mills, with an emphasis on keeping the designs low-cost and durable. I'm looking at different mills here in Europe, where the average scale of production is a bit smaller. I'm interested in getting cost data and amortization of the capitalization using net present value analysis. If there are DIY solutions that can help save costs, then I'm very interested.

I also think Farm Hack is a great idea and there's a lot of cool stuff here.

Brian Baker International Research Networker Research Institute of Organic Agriculture Frick, Switzerland

Louis's picture

My 5 passenger car will be leaving around 6pm in an effort to meet Ithaca, NY before midnight. Entertainment for the driver, gas, and a lack of farting are expected of passengers.

0. Louis
1. RJ
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dorn's picture

Please feel free to post your best water catchment designs to the tools page of Farm Hack. I am sure that others would be really interested in learning from your experience. Use as many photos and drawings as you can! I am in the process of building upland holding ponds using earth berms and poly liners for irrigation and animal watering, so I would be interested in how what you are working on, and your experience might be relevant to our farm.

dorn's picture
Jeff Piestrak's picture

Great stuff R.J. -thanks so much for your thoughtful and enthusiastic comments. Yes, there is indeed an opportunity to join us in Ithaca! Would you like to co-lead this with me?

I'm not a programmer, but do work closely with our IT staff here at Cornell's Mann Library in leveraging ITC tools and platforms to connect people with each other, and the data and information resources they need to be successful. In fact our library has done a lot of work with Drupal and open data. Check out http://aims.fao.org/tools/agridrupal, vivoweb.org, and more recently AgriVIVO, to learn more about some of this work. We've been developing ways to use Drupal as an interface for ingesting and publishing open data, including our http://impact.cals.cornell.edu/ site, which is kind of like a dashboard, that interacts dynamically with VIVO data. Though a bit out of date, this poster describes how: http://www.vivoweb.org/files/MilesWorthington_VIVO_conference_poster-web.pdf.

Perhaps, as you suggested, we could structure the design charrette in a way to generate specific ideas for use of the farmhack site as a farmer dashboard host, possibly leading to some new shared Drupal modules?

I'm currently working with several others on a proposal for a Northeast regional food knowledge ecosystem that could build on/incorporate this work. We're hoping to use Drupal and VIVO as part of this, and work with state, regional and federal data providers to make their data more accessible/usable (Mann Library works directly with some of these agencies, including the USDA, and serves as a repository/distributor for some data).

Our ultimate goal with the regional knowledge ecosystem is to create an open platform based on open standards, that supports further work and innovations from people like you (including paid work). Ideally this would include occasional hackathons.

I'll be meeting with Severine and a few other folks during the Ithaca Farm Hack, and hope to see you there as well! I'll follow up by email shortly to discuss. Cheers, Jeff

R.J. Steinert's picture

Haha, woops, I thought I had missed the Ithaca event but apparently it has not happened yet. Perhaps I will be there for this design charrette after all. :)

R.J. Steinert's picture

Weeeeird. Good job Google :P. I set up a redirect from /tags/fido to the Fido tool page.

R.J. Steinert's picture

Bravo to Jeff for brainstorming this. I've taken a stab at his 3 questions. But before I do, I just wanted to paraphrase what he wrote to make sure we're all on the same page.

Problem: Managing information as a farmer is a big job and having the right info at the right time is difficult.

Solution: We could develop a tool that provides convenient, affordable and up-to-date access to a variety of information and expertise, when and where you needed it, presented in a ready to use format supporting informed decision making and innovation throughout the day or season, year after year.

What

What kinds of information and communication are most helpful? Financial, business, crop, pest, customer communications...

To get data from many sources and make sense of that data, two factors need to be considered when evaluating a potential data source.

  1. data availability - The Internet has done a great job of making a lot of data available. If the data is on the Internet, it's generally considered to have high availability.
  2. data accessibility - Accessibility describes how usable a piece of data data for the sake of making sense of it. For example, a table of data in a PDF document is not easily usable by a computer program where as a table of data in a comma delimited text document is very easily usable by a computer program that may be used to visualize the data for the end user.

Here are three sets of data that I think we could focus on.

Opening existing data sets (The Open Data Movement)

The Open Data movement, which the Obama administration has championed from a federal level (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/07/06/open-data-creates-accountability/) while it still has a strong DIY movement at events like International Open Data Day, seeks to solve help solve these issues. The hope is that any data that has been collected for the pulic will be published as a "consumable" data format, AKA in a format that computer programmers like myself can easily import into any program I might be writing. With a consumable data format of say, listings of available farming land for sale, I could create an HTML map widget that you could copy and paste onto your own HTML homepage/dashboard that would pull the land data from that consumable data source's feed.

Opening real time data

So far I've talked about making existing data sets open, we are now entering a new realm of possibility with the emerging "Internet of Things". This is a concept where the objects around us are collecting data for us and saving that data on the Internet in a consumable data format. The Fido project (http://www.farmhack.net/tools/fido-greenhouse-monitoring-text-message-alerts) that Louis Thiery is still working on is one example of a device that could be used to publish your greenhouse data to an Internet service like CoSM.org which would then give you an HTML graph widget that you could copy and paste onto your own HTML homepage/dashboard that would pull the sensor data from your Fido's data feed. These are exciting times!

Opening up the crowd

The third set of data to focus on is data that we generate by collaborating with each other. Jeff's description of "knowledge ecosystem" is a decent description of what we do in open source communities such as Farm Hack. I think it's important to also point out the economic incentive of participating in this collabaritive process, the incentive being that the value you give up for the community (your time) is a good investment because the advice you get back is even more valuable than your investment. I'm simplifying the value of Open Source immensely here, if you are interested in reading more about the economics of it check out the essay that changed everything in the 90s, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/).

Where

Where do (or would) you access that information (e.g. field, vehicle, home, market)?

Ideally.. everywhere! Up until recently the idea of a Web App has been tied to devices only when they have an Internet connection. If your Internet connection goes down in the field, you lose access to your Web App. In the example of doing documentation on FarmHack.net, it's perhaps much more convenient for a farmer to document a problem with a tool in the field while they are actually experiencing that problem. If they do not have a reliable Internet connection on their smart phone while out in the field, then they lose that opportunity and others miss out on hearing about a problem that they also might be suffering from. The good news is that recent advances in browsers now make it possible to take a Web App offline if that Web App takes advantage of the new browser features. Did you know you can use Google Docs and Gmail offline? Check out my demonstration http://youtu.be/bB515UsfnFA That's all thanks to the fancy new data storage features in your web browser. Next year the company that I'm CTO for will be launching an Offline Web App for sharing educational resources in 20 schools in Ghana (http://www.ole.org/ole-ghana-receives-usaid-“all-children-reading”-grant-award). I'm hoping to take what I learn from developing and deploying that Web App to the Farm Hack Web App someday.

When

When do you need it -do you need answers at a moments notice, in real time, or months in advance as you make plans for the season ahead?

This goes back to the data accessibility issue. Just because the data is available does not mean you can find it or make sense of it easily. I like this idea of giving farmers their own dashboard that they can use to arrange HTML widgets to their liking. Having a dense display of information that a person tailors to their own interest has obvious benefits.

Now what?

I would be interested to hear more about the outcome of this design charette. I'm imaging the following was discussed:

  1. What are some examples of useful widgets for farmers? Any low hanging fruit?
  2. Where can we implement a dashboard feature so people can start collecting these widgets?

My own RSS Reader (http://reader.rjsteinert.com) is a similar to the Dashboard concept we are talking about except that each widget is just consuming an RSS feed from a third party and does not have HTML widgets from other third parties. We could enable dashboards for users on FarmHack.net, we could also build a seperate Web App just for Farmer Dashboards. I'm open to both options. I could probably prototype this in a weekend if anyone wants to get together for a Hackathon. We might be able to roll it into a larger event for programmers looking to build apps for farmers...

mommapie's picture

So I'm new to all this but hello! We live in North West NJ with some goats, rabbits, and too many dogs and cats. My goal for the next few years is to grow most of our own food (including meat) and eventually I'd like to get dairy (a cow, besides goats milk..) I'm also growing most of our own herbs for natural healing. Anyway just discovered this through the Maker Faire yesterday :) Made me happy.