It may be less natural, but has anyone looked into things like vertical farming?

@Fabiofranca (French Fabio?) I am a big fan of food and growing it myself.  In my opinion the most important element to a garden is a good compost heap.  But I think this whole discussion is an important one.  My experience is more of a one man show sort of thing (chickens, canning, personal garden), I think it would be interesting to study how to do it on a big scale.  The kibbutzim were interesting, they build round cities with infrastructure inside and crops around them.

I tried watching the Agricircle tech youtube video, but I think most people who try to watch it will understand why I didn't get more than a couple seconds into it.  What is agricircle?  I suppose it is higher tech than just a rotary sprinkler, which it looked like to me.

@ARGHaynes , "França" is a common family name here. Its more like  France (the name of the country).

Aquaponics seems to be a really smart idea and high productive, but it is intensive in materials and energy. I’m going to start experimenting with aquaponics soon, but I’m still thinking in how  to  build a system in a really really cheap way. The problem is that I didn’t find yet a good media for the beds  here were I live.  

At the moment, I’m experimenting with irrigation from a fish pond (lentils crop). I have one line with chemical fertilizer, other with organic fertilizer, and others only with fertirrigation. Lets see the results.

A good place for discussions about aquaponics is: (http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum) Tons of knowledge there!

@Fabiofranca - I also feel that we should start basically and move towards automation later.  Having said that, our group is very automation centric at the moment.  For better or worse, the interest and skills to automate seem to be here.  So I'm inclined to suggest this sort of implementation as long as it makes some sort of sense.  Automating simply because it's cool or because we have the man power is a waste of resources.

Keep in mind that one of the core strategies of this group is to free up time as much as possible.  No one wants to go back to the stone ages.  If I can spend an hour in the morning preparing an automated machine to do 12 hours work in 4 while I go and do something else useful, I then have the potential to spend 11 hours on the porch drinking a cold beer, or reading a book, or any other useful thing I want.  At that point, I am no longer a slave to the task.

There will always be agro chores that need to be done by hand.  There is nothing wrong with that.  But ideally we would have the flexibility to choose the time and place.  Automation I think can provide that flexibility if done carefully with eyes WIDE open.

Thank you for gathering those links.  We need to do this more often to speed up research.

The Dawg

@ Dawg, we
are thinking in the same way. Personally, the more free time, more time I have to
investigate and experiment with sustainability/resilience projects and my hobbies,
like  outdoor activities and ham radio (I
understand that you are into ham also, isn’t it? By the way, my call sign is
PT2ATC..).

 

I have a
day city job, but live in a small farm.  To
have the work done in my farm, I have the resources to hire manual or
mechanical labor, but I’m not thinking in my personal needs when discussing
open source projects. I’m thinking in ways to help the millions of peasant
farmers in my country to have more free time of their own. I have time,
resources and space to spare with experiments, something they don’t have.

 

I think
that we have to devise technologies  to
help them to do their job faster and more efficiently, but in a way they can
understand and afford. A farm robot, even open source, is absolutely out of the
reach of a peasant farmer in Latin America, Africa and most of Asia, even in the long  term, realisticaly. But an open source “multipurpose
toolbar” (see  Tools for Agriculture: A
Buyer’s Guide to Appropriate Equipment, pp 45) can promote huge improvements in
labor efficiency. Lets help them free their time, so they can learn to use the
internet, and join our discussion about robots, induction furnaces and similar
things!

 

Here is an
idea of basic requirements for an “Open Source Multipurpose Toolbar”:

 

1-It should
effectively reduce time and effort in soil preparation, planting and associated
chores.

2- It needs
to be affordable for a peasant farmer family

3- It needs
to be simple to build with local materials and minimal tools

4- It needs
to be simple to operate, maintain and repair in the field

5- It needs
to operate where space is scarce for

For maneuver  and storage

6- I should
be compatible with a variety of power sources:  animal power, walk behind tractors, small
tractors (Lifetrac!), 4WDs, winch systems and others  available.

I already have a concept in mind. I will try to
draw something in 2D CAD soon.

The anaerobic digester is one step away from a methane digester, if you capture that methane, you have a fuel source.

I created a  wikipage for the multipurpose toolbar, and uploaded some sketches: (http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Multipurpose_toolbar)

The sketch is without the more complex details, like fixtures, depth control for the tools, attachment points and others, but I hope it is sufficient to represent the  idea.

It is a simple tool, but I think that it is more versatile and can perform more functions than the "agricultural spader": (http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Agricultural_Spader)

I did a brief check on the GVCS selection criteria, and I think that the toolbar can get better scores than the spader to the top 50 tools. What do you think?

Hello Will.

This is a small forum, no need to double post....:)

The Dawg