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
Right on...An online marketplace to move R&D to a next step could bring together enough folks to both demonstrate need if outside funders (kick starter/foundations/other grant makers) would like validation/documentation, and it would reduce the development cost if the project is funded internally by coordinating orders, doing small production runs etc.... I especially like the idea of tapping into university projects. I could see projects going both ways - some originating at the university and finding legs to get to the next stage on farm hack, and projects that are stuck (eg. technical barrier, documentation, testing, prototype needed etc.) on farm hack moving forward because of assistance from student projects, university machine shops etc.
Many grants require public posting of results, and Farm Hack could be written in as the dissemination method for grant funded projects. It would also be a good place to cruise to get ideas for new projects to work on for funding proposals.
I think we talked at RSDI about something that might be a cross between an etsy type market place for farmhack tools and kickstarter type function for funding R&D? Cool stuff...