This week is Open Source Week here at the institute. We’re celebrating all things open source. We’re taking a broad view of this term, which generally includes peer production, open collaboration, and free licensing.
Part of our guiding ethos here at the institute is to create and share tools to house, clothe, and feed ourselves in a post-fossil-fuel world. Farm Hack has been doing this for years on their peer-contributed website. Farm hack uses an open-source licensing for everything on its site and requires the same openness from its contributors.
Farm Hack is a community of collaborators interested in developing and sharing open-source tools for a resilient agriculture. We exist as a platform for community-based sharing and collaborative research. Individuals and organizations, non-profits and businesses alike are invited to participate.
Our community is comprised of not only farmers but those with common interests: engineers, roboticists, designers, architects, fabricators, tinkerers, programmers, hackers. You don’t have to own a farm or have specialized skills to join Farm Hack. Farm Hack is a participatory and cumulative project that is as strong as we make it together.
Its tool page has dozens of submitted designs, from bicycle-powered threshers to DIY root washers and horse-drawn snow plows to biochar makers. Not all solutions are designed to be used without fossil-fuel inputs but they are open source, so you can adapt them to your own needs.
All the solutions on the Farm Hack page are licensed under the Creative Commons – Attribution – Share Alike license, exactly the same license we use here at the institute.