This Means There Is Such A Thing As Hudson Valley Vodka

The fifth and final farm-related event I attended this semester was the Farm Bill Hackathon put on by Food and Tech Connect. It was a full day of working on projects related to information technology and the farm bill, listening to presentations and mingling.

This was an event done well and made me hopeful for the potential for hackathon-type events. There were multiple non-profits there with specific projects to pitch at the beginning of the day and although people did come and go throughout the event, there was still a full house at the end of the day when each group gave presentations. 

The food provided was great and best of all the event was FREE. Expensive conferences are disheartening and certainly limit who can attend. I'm not sure how much of the food, drinks and the space were donated or purchased, but all parties involved were taking this opportunity to promote themselves. In Syracuse I felt like I was pulling teeth to get people to just show up, let alone purchasing food and getting the space. Here people wanted to participate.

I worked on a project for the Glynwood Institute's Apple Exchange. This is a group of Hudson Valley orchardists (and distillers) that are moving into value added products like cider, hard cider and apple liquors as a new business model. Value added products are a new market that can be more profitable than just apples. I suspect this has something to do with alcoholic products being much less likely to spoil and being an efficient way to use ugly apples.

These orchardists wanted to have a way to collaborate online to exchange information about cider and liquor production. Their requirements were that it needed to be private, have discussion threads and be able to share pictures and documents. This group is made up of people who range in age from their late twenties through their sixties. They all use email, but beyond that there is a wide range of tech savvy-ness. This platform needed to be easy for people who do not spend all day on the computer to use. These farmers also operate on tight budgets -- our final product needed to be free.

My fellow team members, Amir and Oana, and I spent a whole bunch of time fiddling with different products available online and discussing the specific needs of this group with Sara Grady and Judy LaBelle. Our final product was an online forum that includes a Google Group, Google Docs and Flickr accounts.
The Google group will be the central hub with links to Flicker and Google Docs. All of these parts were linked together and instructions with explanations provided. 

We presented our functional, but inelegant project to everyone there without a visual because Google Groups is not very pretty. Afterwards, a software developer was kind enough to introduce himself and explain to me that Open Atrium fit all of our requirements in one neat package. Oh well.

Although I already knew this about myself, this event made it even more clear that I am not particularly tech-savvy myself. I seemed like everyone else at the conference had their super-fancy macs and iphones going simultaneously and were tweeting as they went. The toshiba laptop I plunked down on the table was a high school graduation present and stood out.

Information technology has created some wonderful tools for communication, but I question how appropriate they are for farms and food. Glynwood also threw out the idea of creating an app for people to get information about orchards as they were driving around the Hudson Valley, but I know that outside of the villages and towns cell phone service is pretty shoddy in Ulster County. I'm sure it only gets worse the farther you are from the City. We ended up leaving that idea alone and only working on the collaboration forum.

The event was hosted by Cookstr which is a fancy recipe search engine that lets you choose from a variety of criteria like ingredients and skill level to find new recipes. But part of cooking is figuring out what a recipe means for yourself, substituting ingredients and estimating amounts. You kind of need to just try it out and see what happens.

Technology has its limits especially for something so tied to the land and hands-on. At the same time, I am in awe of the power these tools provide for communication. 

Be sure to check out the other projects from the hackathon here.