OpenFarm – a free and open database and web application for gardening knowledge
openfarm.cc
openfarm.cc
Although it is not actively maintained I would not say that the project is dead since it is still used as part of FarmBot for crop information management.
The biggest thing the project needs right now is a dependency upgrade above all else. It is running an old version of Rails/Mongoid/Angular 1.x. Folks who are interested in reviving this project should absolutely reach out to the current maintainers (I am no longer involved).
https://github.com/openfarmcc/OpenFarm/blob/mainline/app/ass...
$scope.$watch(). The nostalgia. :)
Probably Vue would be a good option.
Hi,
OpenFarm has not been maintained or worked on in several years and the Slack group is no longer active. If you are interested in taking on a project maintainer role for OpenFarm, please get in touch through the OpenFarm GitHub repo! And please note, this email address is no longer checked regularly (this is a vacation responder replying to you). Thank you for your understanding.
The repo: https://github.com/openfarmcc/OpenFarm seems like it has all the info, and honestly, this doesn't need to be a bloody website, a bunch of MD files with links between each other and hosted on GitHub would be far easier to maintain and extend. If you want to get posh, have it use Jekyll.
Neat weekend hackathon for a group of students or similar, mind you.
We really f'ed up the web didn't we?
Its funny I also missed it on first reading, which tells me have far this has gone.
The web, internet, www, etc literally was a bunch of markup documents linking to each other. That is what a website was. Its even in the name of its language: Hyper Text Markup Language.
Wouldn't it be funny if browsers started rendering markdown and we got to re-create the original simplicity (and ambiguity) of the web this way.
We can start with browser plugins for rendering markdown.
It is a valuable resource and I hope through the exposure here on HN maybe someone will step forward and maintain it.
Botany is a science, the information is out there. Go to your local library and have a browse.
What I don't like is how SF techbros seemed to try and high-tech solve a solved problem. I've seen some of my colleagues set up a farmbot... the same job could be done with one person, a couple hours and a trowel. In practice, the building manager would go to the site once a day with a hose to water the plants.
Point being, there are lots of common skills and local knowledge.
The thing to look for in this sort of thing is open DB schema and protocols.
Some interesting aspects that have been fun to code with (the app is Rails + Elm btw).
- one key detail is Days To Maturity (DTM). This changes between varieties, time of year and latitude. A seasoned grower will know what to expect from a crop they have experience in on their ground. Local knowledge networks are important. The best market gardens know their DTMs and will be tracking it, using it to inform their growing on the fly (maybe their plans need adjusting). Doing things like this should be easier.
- an efficient market garden makes sure they don't have empty space. When a crop is harvested or terminated, a bed flip occurs where it's prepped and the next crop is put in (sown or transplanted). You want to have this planned, ideally in winter before the season starts. You need to know your crop timings (DTM, days in nursery, harvest period (once off harvest or repeat harvest for _n_ weeks). This can be used to ensure you have your succession sowings ready.
- efficient market gardens will most likely have a standard bed width & length, organised into field blocks. A grower will have spacings (distance between rows, in row spacing, multi-sow count). It's easy to calculate the number of plants, rows, seeds for a grower when they're sowing (taking into account a safety factor too). When knowing a seed weight you can also calculate a seed order. This also leads to being able to predict harvest quantities, which leads to knowing how many veg boxes could be filled etc and when coupled with pricing data, can predict yield. You want to know your $/bed-metre and use that as a metric for comparing crops and making decisions.
- if you imagine a weekly veg box scheme, that has _n_ customers (shares) of varying box sizes (e.g a 0.5 box, 1.0 box and 2.0 box), with a season from Some Date -> Some Date. You aim for _n_ number of different vegetables in the box. You can imagine some questions that are helpful for experienced growers and also newbie farmers:
- if I have _n_ acres, what's an efficient way to divide up my field into beds and field blocks
- if I have entered in my crop plan, can you show me what's going to be in the veg boxes each week?
- actually, I don't know what I'm doing, can you just fill in all my beds with a crop plan as a starting point? All I know is how much space I have
- ...how many shares can I support ...how much money will that bring in?
- if I have a sense of prices of my crops, how much value are my customers getting?
- At the weekly harvest: we have harvested and have all the different crops with quantities. We have a box scheme composed of all these shares & share sizes, divide up the harvest evenly so that we know what to pack in each box. Usually this is done each week by hand on a whiteboard or similar in a packing shed. It should be easier (and ideally predicted).I guess I’ll try Thai Basil?
I'm afraid that last sentence did rather make me choke on my coffee. What is supposed to be the incentive for anyone to contribute to something like this?
"Sharing" is something else.
> I'm not minded to…
Which is fine. But many are happy to contribute without caring about the end use of the information. I generally much prefer something like CC-BY-NC myself, preferably later versions which have addressed the third-party copy-left troll issue, but I don't feel using CC0 is deserving of scorn at all. Without any licence explicitly stated, CC0 is pretty much what a lot of people would assume anyway (correctly or otherwise), and in this case a lot of what is being shared is going to be facts, rather than creative works, which are essentially public domain anyway (though I'm sure some corproates out there are busy lobbying to change that…).
No one is forcing contributions. You spend your time, you takes your choice! Of course, you do right by yourself in making sure the licensing terms are to your taste before taking part, and are well advised to do so.
> "Sharing" is something else.
This is sharing, under very open terms. At least they are not claiming ownership, and the rights given are public not just to the site.
Would we really call this "informed consent"? ... or it more likely that contributors either haven't read the licence agreement or have read it but haven't properly understand what it actually means?
> This is sharing, under very open terms [..]
Kind of like one way sharing? You give, they take?
Yes. There are plenty of examples of people sharing knowledge on the internet without expecting anything in return. Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and most open-source projects come to mind.
Imagine: creative person shares their output with friendly-apparently-non-profit website X, then behind the scenes company Y scrapes and uses it, then sells a closed-source product based on it to Big Corps Z1 - Z100.
Y and Z both get rich. The original creator? Gets nothing, and they may not even know what's happened.
Maybe I'm getting too old for this, but "sharing knowledge on the internet" isn't what it used to be. Neither are licence agreements :/
At least on this occasion the site is explicit about a licince it expects user submitted content to be covered by rather than the user just assuming (unless they've not bothered to check).
I would. It isn't at all hidden. It is presented front-and-center in the terms page, right after the introductory paragraphs.
This isn't like IMDB when content which had been given over to public domain, hosted on shared/donated resources for the first half of the 90s, suddenly had IMDB Inc.'s copyright notices all over it.
> contributors either haven't read the licence agreement or have read it but haven't properly understand what it actually means?
That might be a valid arguement for complex clauses hidden deep within pages of legalise, especially in the past when we were all a lot more naive about IP issues, but to miss this (or just not bother checking) in today's world you need to be wilfully ignorant rather than just unaware.
> Kind of like one way sharing? You give, they take?
Sharing with the public via CC0, with them as a middleman. They aren't claiming ownership of anything, they aren't restricting other distribution of what the user has submitted, they aren't hoovering up stuff published elsewhere to power/train a commercial AI.
There are a few things I think might be valid to take issue with¹², the use of CC0 for provided content that you can just not provide if you disagree is not one of them IMO.
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[1] “We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to modify or replace these Terms at any time.” is rather far reaching, though pretty standard and can't affect the license of the user provided content.
[2] “By accessing … the Service you agree to be bound by these Terms.” - just reading a page, or even just loading a page, should not be considered an act of consent in that manner IMO, and is likely not legally enforceable in most places.
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of software that you use directly or indirectly every day would not exist had the authors shared your sentiment.