This week, Dorn Cox introduces us to the modern world of open agricultural technology, and the long history of farmers as stewards of collective knowledge and shared resources. Have you ever heard of a “grange hall”? Well, we hadn’t before this conversation! Join us to discover how farmers today are hacking their own tools, and running long-term experiments into enhancing both local ecosystems and global food systems.
We discuss the history of projects like OpenTEAM and FarmOS, open source platforms for farmers who are collecting, analyzing, and sharing agricultural data; the role of Conservation Districts in the US in maintaining social contracts about land use; and what that means for the future of farming and land regeneration. Dorn also takes us through the long history of farms as stewards of knowledge about the land, holders of shared infrastructure for farming, and centers of agricultural research and innovation. Farms already exchange seeds, tools, and knowledge, and we get into how they could be part of the public library system.
Overview
Timestamps
02:45 Conservation Districts, the USDA’s Conservation Service,
and grange movements for knowledge exchange in the US in the 1930s
12:27 Soil management: the Cornell Soil Health Assessment
20:48 Land Stewards: preserving regional biodiversity
25:20 FarmOS and Drupal Farm: an open farm management system
28:18 Aggregating and mapping farmland and conservation data
36:31 Farm innovation: in ancient and modern times
39:12 Farm tool registries: The FAO; appleseed biodiesel designs
49:10 FarmHack: Right to Repair and hardware hacking
58:33 Regen networks: Environmental regeneration through data-driven stewardship
63:50 Farms as libraries; Revitalizing their role as civic infrastructure
71:20 Moving to an abundance economy
About Dorn
Dorn is a family farmer and system scientist, focused on advancing regenerative agriculture with participatory science and open source hardware. He operates Tuckaway Farm in New Hampshire, is a founder of the FarmHack community and Grassroots Innovation Assembly for Agroecology, and serves as founding director of the Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management. He recently published The Great Regeneration with Courtney White.
Mentioned in this episode
Conservation districts: National Association of Conservation Districts Map
The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service
Natural Resources Defense Council and regenerative agriculture
Federated data and research
The National Grange
Data Stewards for protected lands
Open Agricultural Tech meetings (GOAT): https://goatech.org
OpenTEAM: a technological ecosystem for agricultural management
FarmHack: https://farmhack.org/
Agricultural Right to Repair
Farm OS: https://farmos.org/
