From my view as an engineer, conventional field farming requires chemicals and huge, soil crushing equipment. Organic farming requires passion, dedication, and greater amounts of labor per yield.
What if we design / build smaller, highly-intelligent, adaptable, affordable equipment (Ag Robots) running 24 hours / day that:
• Plant
• Weed
• Vacuum up bad bugs
• Harvest
My farming brothers and sisters, what function should we start designing to make your lives easier (and more profitable)?
Two problems to highlight: 1.) our culture does not pay ecological farmers what they are worth, and 2.) some humans feel trapped and burned out doing one type of work continuously for their career.
Can we create a platform to integrate co-ops operating in a variety of industries under an umbrella co-op which can provide consistent healthcare and resume continuity while facilitating trainings and moves between manual farming outside to high-paying remote coding projects, then to being a teacher or social worker or political organizer, and maybe next to strawbale home-building as an individual needs and desires each season? This would promote skill resilience, holistic thinking, and cross-field awareness too.
I’m particularly interested in hacking on some software for the Tracking ecosystem service goals challenge area. With so many potential use cases tracking different goals and variables it would be useful to give some thought to what similarities and abstractions could be drawn across these multiple use cases. This would inform the requirements for software supporting these efforts and help determine to what extent a single framework could be used for tracking different types of goals with different variables.
Ensuring that a farm is supporting a healthy ecosystem requires tracking of sustainability goals. These tools would target variables such as soil health, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, etc.
This language brings to mind a few different motivations for creating such software:
Support an individual farm to discover, implement and track progress towards ecosystem service goals
Support a community in collectively working towards ecosystem service goals, tracking individual progress and sharing knowledge (what does/doesn’t work)
Help incentivize these goals by connecting farms & data to the growing number of carbon and ecosystem service markets.
We won’t accomplish all of this in the hackathon but I think we could make some great contributions towards identifying generalized requirements for such software and perhaps even develop some initial implementations. It’s important to demonstrate what is possible with our open source tools and community!
I’m thinking of a project that might have the following “core” and “optional” components depending on interest. This project would really benefit from non-coders too, especially those with experience thinking about ecosystem services!
(core) Identify 3-5 ecosystem service goals to focus on for this project. Explore these goals more in depth to identify key variables, variability, outcomes, complexities, etc and discover similarities across all goals.
(core) Give some thought to representing these goals in data - can we create a general schema? What structures are required?
(core) Hack on representing and exporting this data with farmOS Metrics
(optional) For a select 1-2 ecosystem service goals, mockup a UI that explains the goal, displays current status, potential features for recording progress. Perhaps consider this in the context of farmOS Plans?
(optional) Demonstrate how existing GOAT/OpenTEAM tools can be integrated with and contribute to this process?
(optional) Create an app that aggregates farmOS metrics and displays goal progress for multiple farms.
I want this too. My dad used to joke that he didn’t need to pay us for doing hay and straw because it was like a free gym membership. It seemed ridiculous… but now I realize it’s representative of the broader idea that one persons work is another persons pleasure. We need to enable systems to be optimized by combining one groups work (harvesting a field) with another’s pleasure (harvesting a field with friends and family).
I’ve been thinking about this a lot also and love @a2jeff you’re perspective!
Great ideas! There are a few things I’m eager to work on myself - farmOS v2 next steps mostly: crop planning module, more quick forms, JupyterLite notebooks, documentation - but I also love seeing what bubbles up organically at hackathons (pun intended), so I’m excited to see what others end up working on and where I can be helpful!
Looking forward to meeting/brainstorming/hacking with everyone!
Love this idea! I think the farther our work strays entirely into an intellectual or physical realm without outlets in the other, the more we seek to make up for that in our free time. Some sort of a service to allow folks to make these transitions gracefully would be very welcome!
I think this process of looking for common threads to build solutions to multiple problems simultaneously is critical to building momentum and long term solution sustainability!
but I think we could make some great contributions towards identifying generalized requirements for such software and perhaps even develop some initial implementations. It’s important to demonstrate what is possible with our open source tools and community!