Farm
Hack is a community portal for making small farming viable and productive. The website focuses on Open Source technology as a way for making knowledge about systems and tools available to all small farmers looking for resources to make small farming work smart and work best in this age of easy access to information.
As an Open Source portal for small farming tech, the website offers resources that are FREE to download--complete tool designs for work equipment, planting and storage tech, fertilizer systems and more.
Make is a You Tube account that has put together one episode showing how Open Source Farm Tech is shared by outifts like Farm Hack. video is all rights reserved to Make and You Tube
Farm Hack is a community constantly looking at non-competitive
innovation, from something as simple as a wheel hoe to a mobile
bio-diesel processing trailer. As technology built by small, independent
farmers, tool and machinery engineers, hackers and equipment fabricators. Big business usually has their own greedy motives for doing innovation but not the Farm hack community.
The community of small farmers seek to keep small farming a viable and productive way of making a living, aside from sustaining the natural resources availble and keeping the food supply a nutritious and healthy alternative to what industrial farming tech offers.
The portal: www.farmhack.net
currently has thousands of members who invent, document, share, and
hack equipment suited to the needs of small and medium scale organic
farmers, ranchers and foresters.
Another episode of Farm Hack where small farmers share low tech farm technology that is still useful and very practical. video is all rights reserved to sustainAvision and You Tube
To succeed in farming today, industrial agriculture-GMO corporations tell people that their cheaper farm tech and GMO solutions allow you to sit back and watch your farm make good. But small farmers have a better solution to this bogus promise. Industrial farming only binds you to bad tech. Small farm development and open source technology for small farming is the way to go.
Small farms can be made as productive as small farmers want as long as everybody is sharing smart ideas and open source technology as an alternative to what industrial agri-Big Business offers. We should not be gunning for volume and shelf-life as our barometer for food production, but our focus should be on growing food that keeps everyone healthy and happy. Instead of sick and dying like most documented GMO side-effect health cases. Farm supplements should never pollute our water or land, nor drive other existing and productive farms out of business. Diverse farming systems from small farms that keep the food supply grid online is a priority of Open Source technology which is why online communities like Farm Hack exist.
Farm Hack pushes open source technology that fits and serves the needs of a farmer with smaller resources. Farm Hack also reminds us to remember and respect time-tested farming knowledge and tools.
Why Consolidation of Farming is Dangerous
If industrial food production is the only means for mass food production for the supply grid, communities and societies are at greater risk to unscrupulous practices and health problems that occur at epidemic levels. At the moment, GMO tech has already proven to be hazardous to health as doucmented by plenty of farmers AND health and food researchers.
Ifugao Rice is one of the best varieties of rice that is cultivated in the Philippines, even if it is a low yielding variety. Image is Nagacadan Rice Terraces from Shubert Ciencia WikiCommons CC BY-2.0
A return to natural farming tech seems to be the way to go. That includes a reliance on smaller farms as a productive unit of the food supply chain. Plenty of small farmers can do way better than one or two big industrial agriculture conglomerates.
Technology should be proven, reliable AND safe for any farming future for survival of our food supply grid and health. Old technology that still works and IS better than hazardous new tech. Creating our own tools for cultivation and food production is one of the best ways for staying resilient and self-sufficient. Open source technology addresses most of small farming's needs.
New technology that can be adapted to small scale farming systems should be explored and adopted. Going large scale farming for the big bucks creates a disadvantage for the food supply grid because we lose the resilient and flexible capacity of plenty of productive small farms. If a large farm goes down, you lose ALL that production compared with reliance on plenty of very good and resilient small farmers. Open source tech has proven that small scale farming can be as efficient and even better than reliance on few large industrial food farms committed to GMO farming tech.
The tool kits and blueprint resources featured on Farm Hack have their own user testimonies on the effectiveness of their shared ideas, so check out the page and enjoy downloading your chosen work improvement resources.
