Farm Hack Talk

This is not a professional matter. In a professional context my problem would be the usual, heating up a green house in a cool climate. Im just curios if anybody heard of cooling mats (or pads) in stead of heating mats? Cause in my apartment I can control humidity, ad som extra lighting and so on. If I would be living in a house I would simply turn the heat of in spare room. But we don´t have a spare room. And since swedish houses are extremly good isolated and heated through central piping system trough out the town.

From open-electronics.org

Thanks to Jeff Warren, over at Public Labs, for pointing this out--a new book on open source hardware.

This past weekend, at the Vermont Northeast Organic Farming Association conference, we did some usability testing. We sat folks down in front of the website, asked them some context questions about their experience using FH. It was really informative and interesting and we hope to use the information to improve the site.

We're always looking for feedback about the community and the site so that we can facilitate it's improvement. So please let us know what you think and how we can make things better.

Thanks to everyone who came to event! It was a great success and a lot of development and documentation is coming out of it for the Culticycle

A build and documentation-focused event bringing together pedal power designer/builders and video/sketchup/photo/text documentors for a day and a half of pedal power-related conversation, culticycle assembly, and documentation.

Hackpad for the event organizing

with/ Jean-Martin Fortier, Severine vt Fleming, Greenhorns and Farm Hack and and Michael McGowen, Carts and Tools, and Slow Tools February 28th at the Oregon Small Farms Conference

The FabFarm network invites Hack-Spaces, Maker-Spaces FabLabs or what ever you name it to get connected for collaborating in projects. We thought it would be nessesary to get the farming in focus of some more open-source developer.

Kyle Wiens of iFixit wrote an interesting article on his struggle help fix a friend's high-tech John Deere tractor.

Unfortunately, when it comes to modifying existing equipment—like Dave’s tractor—it’s that same idea of ownership that’s most contested. Dave paid for the tractor; he owns what’s tangible: the wheels, the metal chassis, the gears and pistons in the engine. But John Deere owns everything else: the programming that propels the tractor, the software that calibrates the engine, the information necessary to fix it. So, who really owns that tractor?

This is admittedly a shameless attempt at promoting something I'm trying to do for profit, and if it's inappropriate, please remove and I'll fully understand. Here's my story…in 25+ years in the farm equipment business it became apparent that there was a growing number of people leaving the city to move to rural areas to begin a new farm lifestyle. I would meet them when they were shopping for small tractors and equipment and it seemed like they all had fairly common questions to try to educate themselves.

I started my interest in small scale farm ethanol several years ago, I am am currently involved with a project in Haiti to upgrade Ag practices and develop ethanol economies to raise the Haitian people from poverty and stop Deforestation. I am also co owner of the yahoo Alcoholfuel group, an on line list of over 2500 ethanol enthusiasts world wide.