Open Sourcing Home Food Production
Farming is traditionally a collaborative endeavour across different cultures and geographies the world over. Farmers openly discuss and share best practices and knowledge with their neighbours. As society has become more urban this aspect of sharing knowledge can do with an upgrade.
How do we then better transfer farming knowledge in cities? Cities continue to attract more inhabitants and continue to expand which pushes out the food supply chains.
HECTAR Hydroponics, plans to empower people in urban settings to grow their own food by freely providing the designs for a hydroponics system that can be made with materials easily sourced locally. The team is leveraging the power of open-source development to make the technology readily available to everyone who is interested in growing food at home.
The power of the farming community which is already predisposed to sharing along side an open source farming system could led to innovative developments in home based food growing.
Hydroponic farming has possible positive impacts from reducing a household’s carbon footprint, to lowering the cost of the monthly food bill as well as providing a hobby that many believe improves their mental health.
Using an open-source model presents real challenges to meet, such as ensuring that the final unit price is affordable, the use of electricity is renewable and the use of substrates have the smallest environmental impact possible. At the same time farmers have played key roles in developing innovative solutions like turning the first cars into truck for farm use that then quickly caught on for other uses. By giving the urban farming community a new open-source hydroponics platform new innovations will undoubtably emerge such as linking the system with a fish tank for a more circular ecosystem of using fish waste as a fertiliser as well as providing aesthetically pleasing home feature. The possibilities are many and the power of open-source solutions is readily visible in how the community within Raspberry Pi Foundation has been fundamental in its growth. Which communities could also add to the development of other open-source communities like that envisioned by HECTAR Hydroponics.
