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elifarley

Marg wrote on April 22th:

I have a lot of thoughts about your farming goal timeline vs the technology development timelines; also wondering why your equipment design goals seem to be so very western and not really comprehending the realities of the poor of the world, including here -

They are very willing to use appropriate scale equipment, i.e. the Chinese (or Italian)-made walking tractor with multiple attachments, but much more adapted to modest scale sustainable farming rather than replacing external industrial farming with local industrial scale farming. Are you re-inventing a wheel nobody really wants? I find it ironic that you've had most success with a form of personal transport - a car.

Do you feel a farm of 200 ac can support 200 people, starting from degraded land, within less than 3 years? I can't wait to see this happen. Without massive external resources and/or a load of manual labour, it is very unlikely. Check out other sustainable intentional agricultural-based communities like The Farm, Findhorn, etc. and take note of how much they depend on people buying 'ideas' versus actually sustaining themselves, just as this project appears ready to do. And this is in spite of the fact that I have experience with and do understand the tremendous productivity of nature - but you still have to work to benefit from it! You have to spend years developing the skills, and demonstrating the patience, to actually keep living systems going. This is massively more difficult to do than to build equipment using supplies that depend on the whole existing economy to produce. (Or am I missing the info that demonstrates exactly what parts from what junk in a scrapyard woul
d meet the project requirements?)

Meanwhile, India has kept a steam railway system operating since the Brits left, using their own ingenuity and metal-working skills. They are not short on any of the ingenuity you seek to reproduce here for a couple of million dollars (not counting the input costs to get the productivity you're seeking from your land in a short time - which requires lots more cost than the much slower approach to creating a truly regenerative and local food-producing system.

Meanwhile, your approach seems to want to replace human labour with equipment, as usual, thus continuing the view that labour is bad, whereas maybe it is the best possible thing for people to have to devote themselves to. Productivity by machine is the core of our current economy, and it means we are constantly bewailing unemployment, when that is actually the whole goal of western capitalism!

All over the rest of the world, including Europe, an appropriate-scale type of equipment exists which is in high demand, and that demand is being met mainly from China - the 2-wheel tractor and all its attachments, which is being used in all kinds of soil conditions, is based in diesel which can be created from biosources potentially, and definitely is understandable and fixable at quite a low cost. What's wrong with that for appropriate? Why not replicate that? Are you determined to create a dependency on western style agriculture as well as its scale of industry?

I know it sounds wonderful, but so much appropriate scale technology exists and is being used effectively and replicated in other countries no problem - so what is the problem you are really trying to solve?

I started looking into this considering how our 10 years of homesteading (and previous 20 years of living at working-class poverty level due to commitment to non-profit work) might be applied on a project like this, and end up disillusioned by a lot of well-intentioned and well-spoken techno-geeks who are going to waste a huge amount of money to sustain their own lifestyles more than anything else.

Would love to hear the response, but expect to be shut down.

Can't wish you all the best because I'm convinced you're on the wrong track. Let me know if that changes and I'll review and re-consider.

elifarley

Marg wrote on April 22th:

Here's just one example of a wheel you're trying to re-invent. Why are you trying to suck all this knowledge to your website, are you re-creating google or something?
http://www.energyconservationinfo.org/compendium.htm

And don't dare try to sell your equipment until you've truly field-tested it, the rest of the world definitely doesn't need more half-baked ideas from western do-gooders! They are already trying to save their native seeds - and it's being done right here in NA by a great network of people - are they linked to from your site? Do you really believe you're so smart that only you are capable of creating the answers for all the technical ares you list on the sidebar, when in fact so much of this knowledge has been the basis of life for several generations of actual communities, and they have been replicating it effectively but humbly to some degree?

It makes me crazy, as you can see. But I don't mind sharing these views with your potential funders. What a waste for such hubris

Matt_Maier

"Are you re-inventing a wheel nobody really wants?"

> Maybe. OSE is provider-driven in that Marcin and the other people working on it want to do the work more than that anyone asked for the work to be done.

"I find it ironic that you've had most success with a form of personal transport - a car."

> Wikispeed's SGT01 was an independent project. In terms of development it still pretty much is. The teams simply had a lot of overlap of goals, philosophy and process, so they joined forces.

"Do you feel a farm of 200 ac can support 200 people, starting from degraded land, within less than 3 years? I can't wait to see this happen."

> I dunno. I've seen where Marcin uses numbers like that but I've never seen them referenced or derived.

"You have to spend years developing the skills, and demonstrating the patience, to actually keep living systems going. This is massively more difficult to do than to build equipment using supplies that depend on the whole existing economy to produce."

> Yeah, it will be interesting to see what happens if Marcin ever manages to build a test-village. The most interesting thing will be that OSE's approach is to treat the machines as a part of the "living system" so there won't even be much prior knowledge they can lean on. A lot will simply have to be learned for the first time.

"...your approach seems to want to replace human labour with equipment, as usual, thus continuing the view that labour is bad,"

> Creativity is good. Creativity requires free time. Free time requires replacing human labor. Therefore, replacing human labor is good. Even then, it's not so much about the labor as about the time. To reach their full potential people need time off from work.

"the 2-wheel tractor and all its attachments, which is being used in all kinds of soil conditions, is based in diesel which can be created from biosources potentially, and definitely is understandable and fixable at quite a low cost. What's wrong with that for appropriate? Why not replicate that?"

> OSE's approach is not to create a list of machines, but to create an integrated system of machines. This is a fundamentally different strategy than people are used to thinking about. Instead of 50 companies that each make one machine that does its one job really well, OSE is making all 50 machines with the intention of all 50 machines working together to do one job really well. This approach will lead to synergies that are more efficient in total than the lack of efficiency of not specializing each machine individually. For example, OSE is building its power sources so that they are easy to move from one machine to another. Instead of the engine being attached to the tractor with a custom mounting bracket that won't work on any other machine, it is inside of a box that can sit on the ground or hang off of anything. That approach isn't more efficient when you only have one or two machines, but it will be dramatically more efficient when you have to use/maintain dozens of machines over decades. The same basic philosophy is going into all the other parts so that most of the mass of the GVCS will be identical components.

"...what is the problem you are really trying to solve?"

> Too much of the stuff human civilization depends on is proprietary or designed badly on purpose. Now that the internet allows people all over the world to collaborate for (almost) free we need to begin the process of open sourcing all that stuff. Maybe OSE's approach won't turn out to be the best, but someone's got to get the ball rolling.

"Here's just one example of a wheel you're trying to re-invent. Why are you trying to suck all this knowledge to your website, are you re-creating google or something?

http://www.energyconservationinfo.org/compendium.htm"

> Cool, that's a good link :-) and yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Marcin is trying to build a one-stop-shop for all of this kind of information. Is there something wrong with that?

"They are already trying to save their native seeds - and it's being done right here in NA by a great network of people - are they linked to from your site?"

> If you have something to contribute then it's YOUR site as well. There's no reason you can't add stuff to the wiki. It sounds like you have a lot of knowledge on these subjects...why not share that knowledge? Do you have a clear idea of what OSE's money and people should be doing instead of what they're doing now?

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