FarmHack offers farmers new opportunities to work together on tools and innovations that will make our farms more sustainable and efficient.
http://www.youngfarmers.org/practical/farm-hack/about/
We also seek to collaborate with engineers, designers, architects and other non-farmer allies who want to help strengthen sustainable agriculture.
Mainstream agricultural research and development tries to solve farmers’ problems with top-down, chemical and energy-intensive inventions. FarmHack seeks to solve problems by helping our community of farmers to be better inventors, developing tools that fit the scale and their ethics of our sustainable family farms.
Of course, farmers for generations have developed their own tools and solutions in farm shops and in the field, and shared them with neighbors: tillage, transport, power generation, processing, seeding, and spinning. What’s new here is that FarmHack makes it possible to share these innovations with the entire community of farmers, and gives farmers the opportunity to support and improve upon one another’s ideas, across geographic boundaries.
The Principles of FarmHack: Cooperative innovation by farmers to address their farms’ challenges. Collaboration with allies such as designers + engineers. Research and development driven by the needs and insights of sustainable farmers. Bringing farmers and allies together face-to-face at Charrette Events on farms, in grange halls and at institutions. Idea sharing that is open source, over the internet and face-to-face.See on youngfarmers.org
