( NYFC is composed of young farmers, established farmers, farm service providers, good food advocates, conservationists and conscious consumers. In addition, the site serves as a platform to share the latest sustainable ag research and make connections with like-minded individuals and organizations.Īnd you don’t have to burn a gallon of diesel to get to this meeting place!įarm Hack was incubated by the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), a nonprofit founded in upstate New York in 2010 by and for a new generation of farmers in the U.S. Case studies of successful operations will soon be available for farmers to peruse. If that sounds more ‘tool shed’ than coffee shop, Farm Hack is also where young farmers – including the young-at-heart – can start a conversation with experienced agrarians, skirting the need to reinvent various wheels on the farm (unless your wheel is of an exotic design!). A quick peek at the web site, for example, reveals ‘how to’ information on the benefits of a small axial flow combine harvester (way cooler than it sounds), picking the right organic carrot seeds, implementing a web-connected irrigation system, trying a pedal-powered rootwasher, and using low-cost overhead balloon-mounted cameras for imaging a farm. If you are a young farmer in possession of an old tool, or a veteran farmer who seeks a new tool or someone who has invented a new practice or has a cool idea in mind, Farm Hack is the place to go. The nonprofit Farm Hack ( bills itself as an “Open Source Community for a Resilient Agriculture.” It was born during a design workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology involving engineers and young farmers and quickly evolved into an online platform to document, share and improve farm tools. If ever a subject needed a coffee-shop brainstorm, this was it. A small group of farmers, ranchers and conservationists met for a day to tackle the difficult topic of “Drought Resilience on a Small-scale Farm” against the backdrop of rising water scarcity in the West. This might be unusual for a web-based conversation site, to say the least, but there is a lot about Farm Hack that is unusual, as I found out last week when I attended a Farm Hack ‘meet-up’ in Hotchkiss, on Colorado’s western slope. Leave all complaints, rants and political opinions at the door. Do you have a farming issue on your mind, or maybe a tool design that you’d like to share, a crop problem that needs to be solved, a beginner’s question that needs to be answered, or an intriguing idea that needs to be floated? If you do, Farm Hack is the place to go. Pull up a laptop and join the conversation.
Family farm hack 2016 software#
Kenney says the software barriers create corporate monopolies-and destroy the agrarian ethos of resiliency and self-reliance.Welcome to the virtual coffee shop for agrarians! That’s the exclusive domain of authorized dealerships. Big Tractor says farmers have no right to access the copyrighted software that controls every facet of today’s equipment, even to repair their own machines. By sheer dint of personal passion, he’s taking on John Deere and the other global equipment manufacturers in a bid to preserve mechanical skills on the American farm. Kenney leads a grassroots campaign in the heart of the heartland to restore a fundamental right most people don’t realize they’ve lost-the right to repair their own farm equipment.
There are farmers, mechanics, and the odd politician or two who embrace him. He has allies here among the sellers and auctioneers of used tractors and aftermarket parts. The engineer, inventor, and inveterate manure-stirrer is trying to be discreet. It’s Husker Harvest Days, Nebraska’s biggest agricultural trade show, and Kevin Kenney is working the pavilions.