GreenStart's mission is to foster a resilient energy and food system for New Hampshire by providing technical education and practical agricultural examples. An educational non-profit organization established in 2006, GreenStart sees food and fuel security as the end-product of a vibrant, sustainable agriculture system in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire has 40% of its land area in agricultural soils, yet farms only 10% and imports 95% of its food and fuel. New Hampshire has no significant petroleum resources. To feed and fuel itself from sustainable natural resources, New Hampshire must improve its soils while also improving production.
To achieve this end, GreenStart facilitates projects that
1) increase soil carbon “banking”
2) decrease energy inputs
3) increase both food and fuel outputs (positive energy and carbon balance)
4) promote “tight” cycling of nutrients
5) provide opensource access to appropriate knowledge, seeds and equipment
Hi Tim, I am so glad that you posted. I think your post is already a valuable contribution. You have just illustrated where we are with the Farm Hack site - you are on the leading edge of helping to develop the standard for documentation and templates. It was on my "to-do" list to try and post a sample template for community review this week, but I think that a good guideline might be that each entry eventually reach a stage where anyone, anywhere would be able to reproduce and operate the tool using the tool wiki and forum. Some standard components will be a bill of materials, cut lists where appropriate, materials sourcing, and as many technical drawings/CAD/sketchup type files as possible, and then use of sequential photos/videos for the "how to" use and build sections which would follow an instructables like format.
I am facing some of the same organization questions as I start to post several projects from my farm- some of which have many sub-components to them. I would recommend that you try to post separate entries for each section of your design - say one for the movable tunnel as a whole, then one for the wheel assembly and another for the hoop bender. The more descriptive you can be in the titles of the tools and entries the better. The movable tunnel as a "meta tool" could then link to the sub-components that you have developed. I think this would enable others to start new threads for other approaches which could also be linked to the original mobile tunnel entry. I hope others jump in on this conversation too - I think it is important.
There is a general discussion going on in the forum discussing how the community wants to handle the approval process, structure, sorting, searches etc. I would encourage you to jump in to the dialog there as well!
http://www.farmhack.net/forums/do-we-want-tool-approval-process