unnamed-farming-project

Is it possible to codify farming wisdom?

Notes:

It would be really neat to write software to support small independant farms Could hypothetically contribute to citizen science projects

Feature Ideas

Topography-based Soil Stats

• Take in location, topology data, weather data, and existing soil samples from all over
• Should be able to estimate soil composition & common problems

Manual Soil Stats

• Teach farmers to test their soil & diagnose issues
• Provides crowdsourced soil sample data
• Provides record keeping for farmers
• Give recommendations for modifications to soil for different types of crops
• Give recommendations for co-planting to naturally amend soil

Swales & Water flow mapping?

• No idea how this would work, but would be awesome if we could help people make improvements to their land in water capture

Crop tracking + history

• Track crops in specific fields
• 3D map of fields & topology
• Track performance of crops (both in yield and in dollars, extrapolate to dollars per acre per day of time)

Solar + Crop co-planting

• Manage solar production
• Estimate soloar yields + effect on crops planted underneath (cost/benefit recommendations)

Put anecdotal evidence to the test

• Provide anecdotal recommendations
• Record results across farms that tried anecdotal recommendations
• Compile stats on conditions for success/failure of anecdotes
• Research on common anecdotes & where they come from (see Gardening Myths by that british author)

Connect similar farms

• Show farms with similar weather, lattitude, topology, conditions
• Allow farmers to share strategies directly with other farmers in other parts of the world

Connect farms to customers?

• Interface with services like Doordash?
• Collective interface for farmers markets?
• Collective supply for local grocery stores/restaurants/food banks?

Provide useful insight to communities

• Reports on Food security & Food sovereignty (eg. how much food is produced in given regions vs population)
• Info on seasonality & available crops at different farms (eg. what's in season & out of season)

Collect & provide resources to farms

• Funding sources (American AgCredit, etc)
• Legal/regulatory info about certain crops (eg. Pot, Corn)
• Taxes & Credits?
• Anything external that's typically difficult to navigate for farmers

Physical Product Ideas

Bird Tracker

• Microphone on a stick
• Records sounds throughout the day (maybe once a week or something)
• Matches sounds to bird species

Light Monitor

• Plan for solar panels
• Light sensor on a stick
• Measure lumens once / hour (or something)
• Measure wavelengths, light composition, provide data for planting recommendations

Rainfall Capture Meter

• Capture rainfall every day
• Automatically record inches (and maybe type? eg. sprinkle shower, hail)
• Test rainwater composition?

Beehive Traffic Meter

• Little gate that tracks entries & exits for bees
• Records daily/hourly tallies to monitor hive activity
• Generate alerts if traffic drops

Key Principles

Sustainability

• Has to help farmers be sustainable for the long term.
• Dollar maximization in the short-term is useless if it's a net-loss in the long term.

Wisdom

• Has to promote real wisdom over catchy BS
• Common ideas in farming today could be useless in certain times/places
• Teach people how to really take care of the land

Offline/Rural/Remote

• Design to serve rural/remote communities & people
• As much as possible should work on slow internet connections or offline entirely for extended periods
• Should work on a wide range of device types to support ecclectic userbase
• Design for simplicity, ease of translation, ease of migrating data in and out of other platforms

Beautiful

• Should be excellent enough that folks want to print out visuals & keep it close at hand