Chatting with Danielle Gould about Open Source Innovation

One principle of  the Farm Hack community is "Idea sharing that is open source, over the internet and face-to-face." So I decided to talk to an expert on open source innovation: Danielle Gould, founder of Food and Tech Connect, a company that brings together foodies and information techonology people to build a better food system. This is part of my ongoing efforts to better understand the Farm Hack community and research it for a report to be presented to the AEES.

Her experiences with open source innovation include software, data and hardware projects. Although she didn't get into specific projects in our conversation, she did plant some seeds about how to best approach Farm Hack as an open source community.

Currently, a lot of  open source food projects are about creating transparency for consumers about where their food comes from, there are also proprietary organizations that are releasing data for the public's benefit. This is breaking down barriers - the food industry that has typically released as little information as possible.

That's great, but wildly different from farmers hoping to share designs for tools and other information about farming techniques. Farm Hack participants are farmers or design professionals rather than consumers in general and the medium in question is hardware rather than data or software. Designs for a manure spreader have a potential to be posted on a wiki, but you cannot physically give someone a manure spreader over the internet like you can with software or data.

This dictates that the Farm Hack community will need to do business differently from software developers. Danielle mentioned that an interesting example of  open source thinking with a hardware product is Windowfarms. Customers may buy vertical hydroponic garden kits intended for the windowsills of urbanites or they can access the plans for these systems, build them from scratch and participate in online forums. Windowfarmers derive value from both buying products and the customer service that is available.

On the Farm Hack forum someone mentioned quirky.com as having an interesting model for potentially monetizing Farm Hack projects. A person submits their idea for a product and pays ten dollars to put it on quirky.com, the online quirky community discusses it, changes it and if it has gotten enough buzz after a certain period of time it goes into a more serious R&D phase and the design is finalized. If enough of the product is sold in a presale, the product is manufactured and sold through social sales, direct sales and retail. The person who submits the idea gets paid based on the amount of product sold, as do people who played an important role in shaping the product in the community and quirky takes a cut too.

Both the quirky model and the Windowfarms business plans seem like things that Farm Hack could learn from to start becoming an income generating organization that could fund or partially fund its own activities. Right now the Farm Hack community interacts through it blog, forum and stand alone events, but I think there needs to something more to get Farm Hack to gain traction.

Danielle and I also dicussed hackathons events like the Farm Bill Hackathon and Farm Hack's events. One of  their major limitations is time - these are typically one or two day events maximum and are ideal for accomplishing small goals in one shot - like graphics that describe the Farm Bill. They also provide an excellent opportunity to get people from different groups to meet each other and get involved in issues they would not ordinarily encounter like software developers and the Farm Bill or environmental engineers and gravity-fed irrigation systems.

In order to produce prototypes and readily replicable designs for farm implements Farm Hack participants will need to meet in person  over a period of time to collaborate. Perhaps this could be something that farmers and designers submit ideas for and apply to be part of a team that creates a design and prototypes that are made publicly available. Manufacturing seems outside the scope of Farm Hack, but perhaps in the future employees or interns could help farmers trouble shoot projects on site by appointment - sort of a specialized handyman or mechanic?  Maybe more along the lines of Seed and Cycle?

I'm definitely curious what the future of Farm Hack will look like.

I Want to Collaborate with Adrienna

Adrienna Maxwell is my classmate at ESF and she intends to work as an avodcate for a better agricultural system. As ESF is not an agricultural school, finding someone else interested in farms was very exciting.  We both worked in the writing center and became fast friends.

I really appreciate listening to what Adrienna has to say because we are approaching careers in agriculture from wildly different perspectives. She grew up helping with family beef and dairy operations while my mom was teaching my sister and I to read the ingredients on organic cereal with gorillas on the box. “It’s in my family, we’ve always farmed.” She said.

Academically, we are pretty different too. She is majoring in Environmental Studies with a concentration in Biological Applications and minors in Renewable Energy and Environmental Writing and Rhetoric. I'm in the writing minor as well, but am majoring in Environmental Resources Engineering. Her focus is talking to the people with some technical business and my focus is all technical business and sometimes they let me talk to people. We complement each other nicely.

Adrienna’s parents’ cows were always grass-fed, but not certified organic. She was never terribly impressed with organic beef because certification was both costly and not necessarily indicative of sustainable farming practices. Nearby organic farms would often give their cows expensive corn feed. Cows are ruminating animals and are healthier when fed grasses, not grains. The organic certification standards also preclude giving antibiotics to sick animals that would benefit from them. Her family’s herd was never larger than 20 to 40 cows on many hundreds of acres that allowed for rotational grazing and keeping tabs on the health of individual animals.

Unfortunately, Chris and Tracy Maxwell could not charge a fair price for their milk because they were never certified organic. This ultimately is what caused them to give up dairy farming and return to the family beef operation. Adrienna’s mother ran the farm during the week with Adrienna and her siblings helping after school. Her father ran the farm on weekends in addition to working three jobs as a contract engineer. All of this was not enough to pay their bills. This was a common story among small dairy farmers who were consistently paid less than the milk was worth.

This story is absolutely devastating, but effectively illustrated something that I had read about a studied: farming is a hard business. Hearing about the Maxwell's dairy helped me understand just a little bit more what family farms are up against all the time.

The Maxwell family is part of a larger farming community. Beef cattle are auctioned at Empire Livestock Marketing in Burton, NY and their milk was processed by Agrimark. All of the farmers knew each other and were familiar with the products, business and farming practices of their neighbors. Adrienna joked that half of them were her relatives and that they should have all just worked together. Although Maxwell Farms does not have a website, she was kind enough to direct me to her neighbors at Maple Hill Creamery, who sell their products at the Regional Market in Syracuse. This close-knit community is typical of small-scale agriculture in New York State.

At ESF, Adrienna is conducting independent research under Dr. Charlie Hall about the energy efficiency of U.S. food systems. She will be considering all of the energy and material inputs from one step before the crops go into the ground all the way through consumers putting the food into their mouths. Ecological engineers study systems like this using the concept of emergy, or “energy memory”, the energy required at all steps of a process to create a product. This project is only in its infancy, but the scope is likely to include examining the top ten crops cultivated in the United States. She intends to find out for herself if industrial-scale agriculture is indeed more productive than small family farms and at what price.

Growing up on a farm has helped Adrienna define the parameters of her study; as she puts it, “I live in the middle of the research project.” Putting numbers to scientific data is only a vehicle for getting more people on board with reevaluating and reconsidering commercial agriculture. Ideally, sending people to hay in the field for an afternoon would be her way to impress upon her audience the amount of labor and love that goes into family farms.
Although she could have majored in agriculture elsewhere, understanding farming in the context of a broad education in environmental issues gives her the perspective she needs to reach outside of the farming community. I hope to cross paths with Adrienna after graduation and work together to build a better food system.

Seed and Cycle

Yesterday I interviewed Vinnie Bevivino of Seed and Cycle, an urban agriculture consulting company, as part of my research for my report on Farm Hack for the AEES. Farm Hack is all about technology sharing between farmers and other professionals and Vinnie is making a business of just that.

Seed and Cycle helps urban farms, community gardens and school gardens grow food effectively. At the moment, about 80% of their business is building hoop houses. Vinnie suspects that this is because hoop houses are a concrete, tangible project that is easily conceptualized by people just beginning to farm. The remainder of their work lies in strategic planning for non-profits, business plans for start-up farms, crop planning and landscape design, and compost systems.


(The Door Garden's DIY hoop house)
So far most of his clients have been non-profit organizations that range from entirely funded by grants to income-generating organizations. The two for-profit farms that have hired them did so in a very limited way and were merely asking for assistance on projects they were seeing through themselves. Because budgets are so tight for for-profit farms, their goal is always to have a much done by their own staff. Non-profit organizations just starting their farm or garden are also less likely to have the tools or building know-how to undertake project like constructing hoop houses. As the business of urban farming changes, I'm curious how Seed and Cycle's customers and projects will change with it.

For a hoop house project, usually Vinnie will visit a site to give a preliminary estimate based on rough measurements and the needs of the client. He must talk to the city about any underground utility lines are on the property and order the appropriate materials - this process takes about two weeks. Actually building the hoop house takes about five or six days depending on the size and intricacies of the design. There is a basic design that Vinnie has developed through trial and error that is adjusted for the client's specific needs and scale. His last hoop house had a side door installed when typically there are only doors at either end to make deliveries more accessible.

The biggest technical concern with these projects is soil contamination, a very real threat in old industrial cities like Baltimore where most of his work has taken place. The EPA provides instructions and guidelines for testing soils, but they are too vague for Vinnie's comfort and present a liability. In situations where the soil is suspected to be contaminated, either an impermeable layer is put down as a barrier and clean soil is place on top or they build raised beds. Although these methods are effective, it is a lot of hassle to go through if the soil is not contaminated. The need for more definitive testing and a procedure for remediating contaminated soil is clear.

Big things are in the works for Seed and Cycle. Vinnie is taking on a partner, has recently been awarded 3.5 acres by the city of Baltimore and is looking to expand into Philidelphia. I can't wait to see what comes next.

I'm really excited to see, or at least talk to, someone who is making a living at being a technical consultant for urban agriculture. This is along the lines of what I hope to be doing someday - being a technical farm service provider. This is also an excellent example for the Farm Hack community to consider. Vinnie has a background in urban agriculture and is sharing the skills he has  is a very direct way as a consultant. How does this relate to skill share event or hackathons? I think I'll need to do some further investigation.