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open-sourcing design for farming practices
I’ve been looking for open-sourcing methods in the field of vertical farming, and I couldn’t find anything or the right community that is working around this. open-sourcing can not only be about licensing and taking credit, but my intuition is more about sharing the experience and talking over farming practices that needs to be opened up and developed by the practitioners.
I’m a designer and researcher based in Tehran. I’m a graduate of master of fine arts in design and technology from Parsons school of Design in New York, and in the last three years I was working with my small vertical farming organization called AABSOO.
the interaction I designed based on rotary motion of the installation, makes it possible for farmers to grow many more plants, and also reduces the lights and energy needed 3 times less compared to vertical farming shelves or greenhouses in general. The idea is to focus on needs and abilities of the plant, not to consume energy and heavy machinery in order to make farming self-sufficient. We work with the bare-root method, that makes it possible to grow plants without soil or any other substrate.
to open-source the design models is as important to talk over the method of farming that comes with it, and share the learning and practicing, in a way that people can work around and share their insights with each other.
methods of farming are always taken for granted, and it is very hard to have farmers speak up. metaphors of sowing, seeds, growth and farming are found within literature of different sciences, that makes it crucial to think over methods and thoughts regarding agriculture itself. not only make it sustainable let’s say.
it would have been perfect if there was a cooperative or like a union to take care of this work. open-sourcing designs, sharing knowledge, putting together a youtube channel, which is almost impossible to do from Iran.
do you know of any open-sourcing methods for farming as such?
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3 Replies
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This sounds really interesting @nima thank you for sharing. I appreciate your concern not only for the design of the vertical farms, but also for the open source orientation. I remember reading a piece recently in The Guardian about new corporate mega-farms on a vertical basis, which would recapitulate the same problems of corporate agriculture all over again. Others may have ideas on this, but the one group I can think of that works on open source agricultural technology (and has a sharing hub for this) is the Edge Collective: https://edgecollective.io/
Happy to try to connect you if that would help. And if you’d like to share more about your own project with our EDC network in the form of a discussion, or a blog, please just let us know. We are also fans of open source infrastructure.
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check them out catalogarbo3_23.pdf (latelierpaysan.org)
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FYI, an upcoming conference on open agricultural technology
https://goatech.org/2024/07/08/goat-2024/
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