Local farmers have been hacking forever.
In a business characterized by geographic isolation, fickle markets and dependence on equipment, the ability to innovate and adapt is critical. But only in recent years have the web-based tools emerged to allow farmers the ability to connect with and learn from each other across wide geographies, enabling them to improve upon innovations more and reinvent the wheel less.
Since 1997, the Pittsboro, North Carolina-based Rural Advancement Foundation International has been cataloguing these innovations as it has worked with North Carolina farmers to help replace lost tobacco revenue through a cost-share program called the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund. What began as a four-county pilot eventually expanded with aid from the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission to serve the entire state.
“The TCRF supported the creation of between 578 and 583 new jobs in 2008-09, between 1,708 and 1,721 new jobs in 2009-10, and between 1,861 and 1,890 new jobs in 2010-11,” Dr. Andrew Brod, research economist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is quoted as saying on the RAFI web site.
The program has supported innovations like mobile fresh food markets, farm-to-school efforts, innovative CSA models, adaptive reuse of tobacco harvesting equipment for growing vegetables, mushroom culture, and energy, water, and soil-saving innovations.
As part of the cost-share program, RAFI has been active in facilitating peer-to-peer learning opportunities so that others may benefit from lessons learned in these new innovations. The organization has amassed a trove of insights and information thorugh this work, and is now partnering with Farm Hack, an open-source online platform designed to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing of innovations and tools for resilient, sustainable urban agriculture, to create an online platform for sharing it.
The partnership seeks to create a “Growing Innovations” online database and book to catalogue the hundreds of projects facilitated by RAFI over the past 17 years. Currently seeking $14,000 in support through a Kickstarter campaign, the project seeks to celebrate the ingenuity of local farmers while exposing their ideas to Farm Hack’s international audience.
“RAFI is 100% in line with Farm Hack’s mission to get the best farming practices and knowledge into the public domain, and to create a food system that produces the kind of food we collectively want to eat, that we can trust, and that supports a resilient agricultural system,” Farm Hack
Co-Founder Dorn Cox said in a press release.
“It’s important that every farmer has access to the best information,” Cox added. “Every farm is already a research and development farm. We’re excited about communicating that and enabling farmers to share their accomplishments with the broader world.”
