By Danielle Davis / February 5, 2013
via Seedstock.com
Employing web-based social networking technology to simulate old school neighbor-to-neighbor information share, Farm Hack is a farmer-driven, collaborative project that develops, builds, documents and shares tools for resilient, small-scale agriculture. The secret behind it all is its use of an open source web platform that allows users to edit all the pages on the site – it’s basically a wiki site for farm technology and innovation – resulting in a user-driven community that self-evolves according to the needs of its members.
“It’s not a new thing for farmers to repair their own equipment, adapt their equipment or design new tools – this is something that’s been happening for centuries on small family farms – but the idea of Farm Hack is to use new forms of communication technology and organization to accelerate that process,” explained Kristen Loria, Farm Hack Coordinator. The general aim is to help make small farms more viable, successful and numerous, an evolution which Farm Hack believes will bring us towards a more sustainable, resilient and healthy system of agriculture and food.
Farm Hack accomplishes this in a number of different ways. Born in 2011 from the efforts of several Greenhorns and National Young Farmer’s Coalition members as a simple farm tech blog, the online community now provides templates for users to post documentation of tools they’ve designed or unrealized ideas they have.
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