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 | |
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Refrigerated Box Truck | LocalFoodLogic | Monday, November 4, 2013 - 5:33pm | Monday, November 4, 2013 - 5:33pm | 0 | |
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Lawnbot for pathways | dc denison | Saturday, November 2, 2013 - 5:32pm | Monday, November 4, 2013 - 6:11pm | 1 | |
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Hack pad for build day | dorn | Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 10:13am | Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 10:13am | 0 | |
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Hack pad for build day | dorn | Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 10:12am | Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 10:12am | 0 | |
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Triangle hitch pre-planning | dorn | Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 10:10am | Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 10:10am | 0 | |
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Triange hitch build day | luseedhead | Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 9:49am | Sunday, October 20, 2013 - 10:44pm | 3 | |
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Open Source tool landscape for big data | dorn | Monday, October 14, 2013 - 12:16pm | Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - 4:47pm | 1 | |
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Testing FSNE | elfarrell | Monday, October 14, 2013 - 11:04am | Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - 10:19am | 2 | |
| FSNE Network Team | elfarrell | Monday, October 14, 2013 - 10:36am | Monday, October 14, 2013 - 10:36am | 0 | ||
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Farm Hack North Fork Lodging Options | Kacey Kropp | Thursday, October 3, 2013 - 2:25pm | Thursday, October 3, 2013 - 2:25pm | 0 |
Hello All! My name is Kathy. I have a small farm in Waynesboro, Virginia in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. My focus is on sustainable farming, being chemical free and getting back to basics. I generally refuse to "buy in" to the "need" for all kinds of expensive things to farm. I do operate on a small scale and I figure if they didn't need it 200 years ago, why would I need it now? I am a free thinker and I am always experimenting and coming up with new, low cost, sustainable solutions to make things easier. My farm named "A Better Way", has many different meanings… a better way of living, a better way of doing things, a better path in this life's journey… :)
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 2/8/2012]
Hi Folks,
My name is Ryan. I'm an urban farmer in Little Rock, AR. I operate the Victory Garden Project, a 0.25 acre ubran micro-farm. I first heard about Farm Hack this weekend at the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. My design interest is on tools and systems appropriate for small urban spaces.
Cheers!
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 1/23/2012]
Hello to everyone,
My wife and I have spend many nights talking about starting a small family farm and hope to get started in earnest on this adventure sometime this year. We've talked about moving to many different areas in Oregon with a current emphasis on Southern Oregon as we could likely coax older, less rain tolerant, family members to join us. My wife and I have modest training in farming, but we return to our food system as the most intriguing, pressing and ultimately human activity worth focusing sustained thought upon. I am an architect in Portland, OR. and an adjunct professor at Portland State University teaching environmental design. My wife coordinated and taught a garden-based education program and has worked with community gardening programs in Seattle. She is currently raising our two young daughters.
As a architect, I have experience in the design of hospitals, civic buildings and a little experience with animal hospitals/laboratories. Recently I've been focusing on agricultural architecture (mostly as a way to work through all the various ideas about running our own farm). The knowledge of how to grow food resiliently and what such an endeavor requires has been rushing past us for some time now and we're starting to reach out and see where these thoughts lead. There are so many people who have so much to share about the nuts and bolts of this reformation. I would be delighted to play some role in the integration of this knowledge.
In the meantime…I will likely be participating mostly as an observer. Thanks for having me.
Take care, Travis Bell
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 1/21/2012]
Hi there everyone,
I'm Emily, and I'm an urban farmer living in South Minneapolis, MN these days. I'm originally from New Hampshire, but moved to Minnesota for college and accidentally fell in love with the place. Before I graduated last May, I started a small urban farm with some other young folks, and we spent last season farming three vacant lots in residential neighborhoods. We grew veggies for a 17 member CSA and a small farmers' market. It was a good learning year, and three of us from that operation are continuing on next season, merging our farm with two other small urban farms to form a big, new, shiny venture called Stone's Throw Urban Farm. This year, we'll be growing for a 100-member CSA and a larger market, as well as some wholesale accounts. I'm the CSA manager. I attended a Farm Hack event last November when I was visiting my folks in New Hampshire. I really loved the community and thought I could benefit a lot from being around smart, inventive farmer types. I love to farm and want to make it my livelihood for years to come, but mechanics and tools are not my strongest suit, so I'm excited to learn here. I'll also be spending a few hours every week this winter working on filling in this forum with useful information, so you'll see me around here a lot. Cheers!
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 1/18/2012]
Hi all! I'm Grant Schultz, a farmer in Iowa.
http://twitter.com/grantschultz
I love using all parts of my brain to create a new food system, and create wonderful farmhacks in the process. I'm working on an Allis G electric conversion, a farmhack greens harvester, emission-free high tunnel tillage (electric tiller that doesn't suck), and other fun things.
Strong in fabrication.
Are you an engineer with 3D modeling expertise? Get in touch, we'll build beautiful things together
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 1/17/2012]
Hello, I am Jeremy Conyac. I operate Conyac Brothers Farmstead near Marysville, WA. We raise pasture hogs including Hereford and Gloucestershire Old Spot breeds. I also work as an organic farm inspector.
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 1/10/2012]
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.
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 1/4/2012]
Hi, I'm Leanna Mulvihill. I'm an intern with the National Young Farmers' Coalition and organized Farmhack@ESF last fall. This May I'll be graduating from SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse with a degree in forest engineering. My goal is to learn more about agriculture and bridge the gap between farmers and engineers. This forums looks super useful and exciting. Thank you to everyone who put it together!
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 1/3/2012]
Hi, My partner Greg Freistadt and I run Deep Roots Farm in Moscow, ID. We are going into our 4th season of marketing farming. We are starting a CSA this season as well as committing to a much larger farmer's market. We have spent several years apprenticing and working on other farms as we experimented with our own farming system. We love to tinker and by the nature of what we do, we make it do or do without. I currently work at the University of Idaho where my supervisor is a Bio & Ag Engineer. I was telling him the other day about Farm Hack and he was very interested in getting some of his colleagues in the Pacific Northwest/Western Canada involved in having a Farm Hack over here on the other coast. Is anyone else working on this already that I can point him towards? Marci Miller <href="Hi, My partner Greg Freistadt and I run Deep Roots Farm in Moscow, ID. We are going into our 4th season of marketing farming. We are starting a CSA this season as well as committing to a much larger farmer's market. We have spent several years apprenticing and working on other farms as we experimented with our own farming system. We love to tinker and by the nature of what we do, we make it do or do without. I currently work at the University of Idaho where my supervisor is a Bio & Ag Engineer. I was telling him the other day about Farm Hack and he was very interested in getting some of his colleagues in the Pacific Northwest/Western Canada involved in having a Farm Hack over here on the other coast. Is anyone else working on this already that I can point him towards? Marci Miller http://www.deep-roots-farm.com
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 1/2/2012]
My name is Adam Lemieux. I am responsible for research and development of tools & supplies at Johnny's. I want to congratulate Ben, Dorn and any others that were involved in launching this forum and also give them kudos for all the work they are doing at Farmhack. I am very excited to finally see people posting ideas in a forum setting like this. I think it is the perfect vehicle to share ideas and feedback. Recently, I had the privilege of spending a couple days with a really great group of industry professionals at the Stone Barns Center with the similar intent of brainstorming scale-appropriate ideas for small commercial growers. We met the day after the Young Farmers Conference and called our meeting the Slow Tools Summit. I posted a trip report on my blog that also has an attached photo gallery. It can be viewed here: http://johnnystooldude.blogspot.com/2011/12/2011-young-farmers-conference-and-slow.html Thanks, Adam.
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 12/27/2011]
I am Louis Thiery and I like to play with electronics. My first exposure to farming was this summer when I spent 3 months WWOOF'ing in Colorado – I loved the work and the lifestyle but wanted to find a way to integrate my specialized interests and skills.
As I paged through catalogues for farm electronics, I was a little surprised how expensive the devices were. In addition, all the technology was closed and standardized which didn't make sense for small farmers who run idiosyncratic farms and like to tinker with their devices. Thus I decided I'd start working on open-source electronics for farmers, giving myself an opportunity to further my skill set while also attempting to make these technologies more accessible and individualized.
I'm currently living in Milford, NH and working from the Gardenbot.
[this comment was migrated from the old Farm Hack Forum, it was originally posted on 11/24/2011]
A now related discussion is the topic on Tool Wiki Template. I just suggested we have a "Problem" header.
Given the conversation on the importance of what problem a Tool is trying to solve, perhaps we also have a "Problem" heading. I started a "Tool Wiki Template" wiki that we can start building out as an example.
The Tool Wiki Template wiki can also include formatting examples. Something like making a table for the bill of materials first comes to mind.
Also check out the Tool Wiki Template conversation that we're having in the Farm Hack Website Ideas Forum.
Amen to that. I'll keep my eyes open for a good image/document uploader.
The "Stream of Wiki Edits" on the "Farm Hack River of Activity" page gives us a place to track activity on the wiki pages even if they are not linked to from a Tool, Forum topic, or comment.
See http://farmhack.net/activity
How do folks feel about implementing David's suggestion of parameters in the same fashion that I implemented the Tool Type parameter?
Given Ben's point of
I added a quick feature so we now have faceted search on the Tools page by one parameter, the Tool Type parameter.
What does everyone think? It could probably use some styling and more parameters but I think having it as-is is better than not having it right now.
I think it ties the name and concept together perfectly.
Spent all day working on the user list management, their user groups, and can now program via text message! I'm starting to run low on memory though...
Right now, you can definitely program and reprogram it with text messages and other users can join by text message too. Once I have the whole program consolidated (I'm working on two different programs that I will merge soon), I will work on adding some bells and whistles like human readable commands like RJ was saying. However, I think that we will run out of space very fast that way so I will first start on user management commands, like seeing if a user exists and removing users.
Insofar as programming FOR people via web service, it would definitely be neat! I don't think it will even take any extra code to make Fido run with it.
Good catch Dorn. I actually just made a whole bunch of improvements to the Tool form. Go ahead and update the Annie's All In One and let me know if it the changes make sense to you.
I update the title to reflect the status and better describe the problem.
-RJ
Marked as done and moved to the Website Ideas Forum.
-RJ
Correction: Preview comment is working, preview forum post is not so I disabled it.
If you want any advice/help documenting please feel free to ask. I'm volunteering time to help get this website working. You can contact me directly on my contact form http://farmhack.net/user/8/contact.
I take from that suggestion that one should first ask, "What is the impact that I would like to improve and in what ways would I like to see that impact improve? This point carries a lot of weight to me because I have first hand experience with the fall out in situations where folks define the software before they've fully defined the problem.
As the current Farm Hack website stands, we're trying to tackle a knowledge vs. wisdom issue. The Internet is a very effective place to make knowledge available but there is no internal mechanism on the Internet itself that takes all that knowledge and turns it into wisdom. I'm hoping that the functionality of this website will help people aggregate knowledge in each Tool's Forum and then refine that knowledge into wisdom on each Tool's Wiki. But alas, the labels this method uses suggests that we start with a tool before we have the problem defined. Perhaps we should start with Problem Wikis that have associated Problem Forums...
Talking with Dorn Cox in the past few months and after a presentation by Ben Falk on Resilient Food Systems at the NOFAVT Winter conference, my eyes have been opened to the importance of healthy soil. Falk quoted someone in his presentation to the effect of, "Society has always been a struggle to keep its nutrients on the land and out of the sea."
An online Fido configuration service, that's a really great idea. Building the online form to generate the proper string is the easy part (1 hour), integrating with an SMS gateway so the website can send text messages is the tricky part. The easiest route to send a text message using an SMS gateway is to use a "web service" like Twilio that provides one easy to integrate with service point that works no matter what cellphone carrier the number you are sending to may be using. The downside here is that a service like Twilio costs a penny per text message while you can send text messages for free if you integrate with each carrier individually. I'm not going to worry about costs though because having so many people using a online Fido configuration service to the point it's costing us a noticeable amount of money is a problem we would like to have.
I think it makes sense that the online Fido configuration service generates the string and then gives the option to send the string to your Fido as opposed to just sending it right away. This leaves open the option to text the string yourself which can be seen as a learning experience. We can start by building the online Fido configuration service form as soon as we settle on a messaging protocol and then build the "Text this to your Fido!" option later.
Hi Ed, glad to have you here. I think your comment resonates with a lot of us who have been active in getting the Farm Hack project together. Our definition of "tool" has been pretty broad and there has been discussion that to solve a certain task (say, deep tillage) one might use a mechanical tool (yeoman plow) or a biological/management tool (tillage radish).
Don't hesitate to contribute "tools" and discussion that fit into the latter category!
Using the cell phone to program it sounds great. In thinking through the interface let's keep in mind that the basic text plan for the phone has 200 messages/ month so people will probably want to try to keep below their limit, although I'm sure some users will be fine with paying a little more to get more updates, etc.
Louis I like the idea of being able to program lots of variables with one text using commas. Maybe an added feature could be coming up with a little web interface to make this more intuitive-- farmer could plug in the variables into a form (fill in box for upper limit, lower, limit, check box for updates daily, hourly, etc) which would generate a text message to the Fido coded properly, using some kind of online SMS tool? I don't know enough about this to know if it would work, or how it could work, just an idea.
Or, the web form could just generate a series of numbers/characters for the farmer to then text to Fido, which Fido would understand-- just a way to make the inputting more user friendly.
It looks like we've settled on this issue for now. I've found it's best practice to summarize the status of an issue in it's original post when it has reached a good stopping point. @Louis You could write something like...
ConclusionWe've decided to drop the dependency on a keypad and lcd screen in favor of interfacing with Fido using a separate cellphone. See the comment that inspired this and check out our new conversation Program your Fido by sending it text messages .