Stereotypes of technophobe, straw-chewing farmers abound, but the truth is our food system is highly industrialized, mechanized, and computerized—overly so if you ask me. It’s also a largely closed, proprietary system that’s designed to keep the pesky public out. Strange, that something as fundamental to our existence as food would be largely hidden from view.
This system also makes it hard for new and young farmers to get into farming and to compete with big corporate farms when they do so. All that technology and R&D costs a lot of money.
Farm Hack is sticking a big wrench in the cogs of that system. Guided in equal parts by ideals of sustainability and open source, the nonprofit group has a developed a community of 20,000 members that develops, shares, tweaks, and hacks tools that make farming and food production accessible to all.
“There’s a demand for a different kind of agriculture,” says Dorn Cox, Farm Hack co-founder and president of the board of directors. “But the solutions are not going to come from the industry that is promoting the status quo.”
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