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
Thank you so much for your tour and posting this information - do you think that you might be able to start a tool wiki for the microhydro systems? I think it would be a good repository for folks starting out on projects - I think I mentioned that I think that micro hydro coupled with a gassifier(or whatever other power source is abundant on site) powered water pump(direct drive or electric) might be a way to even out power storage/generation needs in a farm application - ie. water stored in large farm cistern used to store excess power from generator with microhydro to generate on-demand power when needed. I am thinking about hill side storage ponds etc. which could also double for irrigation and animal watering storage. I would love to work up some numbers on a few case studies...