Greetings GOAT Community!
CAFF has upcoming opportunities that support small farms with appropriate technology adoption and we’d love to include the GOAT community, especially those on the west coast.
First opportunity = Small Farm Tech Expo on December 2nd at UC Merced (CA). Let me know if you’re interested in exhibiting! At the Tech Expo we’ll also be releasing new materials including a cool booklet highlighting farmer-led innovations from the field and a “Needs Assessment on Tools and Technology for Small Farms in the San Joaquin Valley of California”
Second opportunity = the annual Small Farm Innovation Challenge is back and the portal is open until December 31st! We’re calling on farmers, entrepreneurs, students, hackers and any creative farm-loving tinkerers to submit your tech-based innovation–from new tractors to apps to ingeniously repurposed barn tools–that can help small-scale farmers compete, survive and thrive. $10,000 in prizes. Apply by December 31. All stages of development welcome: DIY, hardware, software.
Let me know if you have any questions! Appreciate this community and all your work supporting farmers.
Cheers,
Elizabeth Vaughan
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Hi @ElizabethVaughan,
I’m confirming publicly that I’ll be bringing the GOAT booth to the Dec 2nd Small Farm Tech Expo!
Hi folks!
I’d like to report on an excellent event held by CAFF yesterday - their Small Farm Tech Expo! I brought the GOAT booth as an exhibit and there was a lot of interest. Here are some interesting organizations I met!
Cal.net provides internet services on farms in addition to full sensor network set up and customization from soil sensors, water monitors, and so much more. They use off the shelf equipment for their implementations, prioritize use of open source equipment. They have partnered with Emergent to developed a web dashboard to monitor the network, which has an API that allows data to be used in other tools too (ahem, farmOS and LiteFarm maybe? @mstenta @paul121 @hwittman @gbathree ). I also recommend checking out their recent case study.
IOT4Ag is a research group across five institutions, including @dbuckmas at Purdue! There is a lot of opportunity to engage this group within GOAT, though not all projects developed in this initiative are open source. Something that especially stuck out to me is that these might be a group of folks we could coordinate with on the GOAT student internship / chapter concept (@sudokita).
CAFF released their Needs Assessment on Tools and Technology for Small Farms in the San Joaquin Valley of California. I think many of their findings are informative more generally beyond this region, and I especially appreciate the approachable language that is used to describe their findings. When introducing more complex terms, such as digital sovereignty, they use very plain language to explain the concept. I think we can learn from this example as we build farmer involvement in GOAT.
The owner of Riverdance Farms was very impressed by the drive and intentions of the GOAT community and would love to host us for demonstrations or research. 
So if folks are looking for a farmer-colalborator, reach out to Cindy!
The Foggy Farmer wants to invite GOAT for a Podcast! I personally don’t podcast well, but I think many of you out there do. I think it would be great to have a few folks from different orgs be present for such a podcast, if we’re interested.
A few other groups that were there that we are already acquainted with include:
F3 Local: https://www.f3local.org/
Farm-ng: farm-ng · GitHub
GrownBy: https://grownby.com/
As always, thanks to @ElizabethVaughan and @mridoutt for an amazing event.
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Great recap and share out Juliet!! Appreciate you showing up, spreading the GOAT word, and for supporting our small farms with all these great resources! We are grateful to have your presence in CA!
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