Today marks the 3rd anniversity of settling the land.
We came with a hundred chickens, a goat, Massey Ferguson tractor with loader, Chevy suburban, trailer, Lister one-cylinder diesel running on waste oil for electricity, and a lot of dreams and desires.
We call the time up to this point The Early Days of Factor e Farm. We din’t come to the land with a name. It was about a year later – when Ronny came and build the cordwood hut – that the Factor e name became self-evident. That’s also the time when we started this blog.
We are now transitioning out of the proverbial early days of Factor e Farm. Some of the initial chickens are still around, one goat turned into seven, and none of the above equipment is with us any more. We got solar cells for power – a sweet but non-replicable option – and slowly we’re moving to replace our infrastructure with self-made, open source alternatives. Unfortunately, we need to design and build them, as they don’t exist yet. That takes time, but someone has to do it.. We’re asking how we can build advanced civilization for real. This is the nature of the Factor e Farm Experiment.
The open source tractor is doing well after its year in operation. Yes, the predicted maintenance costs of under $100 per year are real, and we just added MicroTrac as the small walk-behind tractor. Interchangeable motors, parts, and power units are real as predicted, but nobody believed that at the time. With CEB v2.0 a few days away from completion – this will be a ground-breaking day in human history as we demonstrate a potent example of open source hardware development applied to meeting human needs. Colleagues promised an article in the Financial Times upon successful product release of the CEB press. The vault construction workshop at the end of September will be a good example of the practical results. We also predict visible transformation in the local area on the 5-10 year scale as the fruits of our work come into normal use. We’re not stopping there. It will take 30-50 years for the Open Source Ecology movement to be recognized with a Nobel peace prize or equivalent. In the meantime, it’s just another day – at Factor e Farm.
Congratulations!
I join the congratulations….In the meantime this has become a much of a global place with many eyes looking at you and all whats going on there. There might be difficulties, conflicts, even quarrels, questions of authority and they should be carried out with the same diligence as the technology is developed. I learned a lot from Brittanys post about the shortcoming of life there, and why she left. We are here to overcome all this, to figure out how a state of abundance helps us to create true peace beyond jealousy. I think there is a lot to learn…
What a remarkable anniversary! Congratulations and – I guess it works here as well – many happy returns 😉
Factor E Farm is the most visionary project I am aware of, since it encompasses such a wide array of challenges.
Wishing you the very best for all the present and upcoming challenges!
Some things just take time. Action time, that is.
I’m hoping the project will fork in 2009 or early 2010. Someone will take LifeTrac, CEB etc and do it their own way, enriching us all.
Happy anniversary to all, even to those who’ve kind-of-left along the way. We’re all unique parts of everything, want it or not!