Critical Reflection

(apologies, this is poorly organized)

With David heading out to a farm in Missouri, and Austin's farm having collapsed financially, I believe the time has come for more critical reflection on community and open-source farming initiatives. Recently I had an enlightening discussion with James Rutter of Providence's AS220 Labs hackerspace. What struck me in particular is that AS220 Labs was unable to adhere to the fab-lab charter, because it is financially unsustainable. This in an instance of a more general problem : projects that aim to develop sustainable technologies and practices are unable to bootstrap themselves, and require significant donations of money, resources, and time.

In their infancy, open-source projects are hard to distinguish from hobbies for wealthy, well educated individuals. Linux was once considered a toy operating system, a geeky hobby for computer programmers. Today, Linux powers the servers of web giants such as Google, and can replace costly proprietary operating systems on consumer machines. We hope that other open source initiatives follow this trend, including open source hardware, and, god willing, farming.

If an open-source project tackles a real need, and the body of community-owned knowledge increases, then we can expect the project to be beneficial. Open source initiatives direct surplus time and wealth from, say, [[insert your favorite expensive and socially useless upper middle class past-time here]], into projects that are equally enjoyable but have real benefits. Think of these project like donating to charity, but time and expertise can be much more valuable than money. The power of open-source is that it brings private technologies under community ownership, freeing them from the backwards incentives of competition, and creating a more efficient solution.

But, open-source is not the same thing as sustainable. Open-source projects can be environmentally unsustainable, and I can have private businesses that are nevertheless sustainable. If I understand correctly, MakerFarm would be more of the former, and entail some sort of community space for open-source research into sustainability. The title MakerFarm is meant to invoke the 'Maker' movement, MakerFaire, MakerBot, MakeZine, etc. This movement is, as far as I can tell, comprised of people who have day jobs, lots of education, and surplus time and money. Very few people are getting their paychecks from the MakerMovement, and most are participating in it as a form of entertainment. In light of this, I imagine that a MakerFarm would be a hackerspace. It would not be net sustainable, and its principle benefit would be providing community, education, and project space at a reduced cost.

I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the above vision for a MakerFarm is unsatisfying for some of our members. Some people don't want a project, they want a lifestyle. I believe they want a farm that makes enough profit to pay taxes and keep itself running, that uses sustainable practices, and requires as little as possible external resources. This is not sustainability, it is low-impact survival. It is low-impact in the sense that it does no harm to the environment, but it is also low-impact in that it effects very little social change and does not naturally expand to replace less sustainable practices. The real contribution is finding solutions that are equally efficient as industrial scale farming, but more sustainable. The measure of contribution, then, is not in the farming itself, but in the knowledge created and disseminated. We may find that current sustainable farming practices leave no time for optimization or outreach. Because of this, I believe that the actual, practical advances in sustainable farming will come from professional research institutions. MakerFarm as a hackerspace could the provide the natural "citizen-science" and outreach counterpart to these research endeavors.

I'm not sure how accurate this speculation is. I'd like to see a few words from Austin about why the last farm he worked on failed and whether or not this failure changes the goals for MakerFarm.