June Agriculture Walkthrough at Factor e Farm
Here is a video produced by Sean, on the agriculture overview of Factor e Farm: The bottom line is that resilience in food is not difficult to come by, but it presently requires more energy than we have with 2 full time people – engaged fully in...
OSE Swadeshi Dialogues
This is part one of a discussion on important issues related to resilient communities. Swadeshi means ‘own land’ when translated from Sanskrit – and it indicated self-reliance, or extended further – responsibility. This series,...
Zero Turn MicroTrac
MicroTrac achieved zero turn motion. If one walks around rapidly, one can turn the walk-behind tractor around in place. MicroTrac is turning out to be a beautiful freak: Play this freak show. To do this, we added two small, freely-turning wheels to MicroTrac....
May 1 Walkthrough
Here is the natural history of Factor e Farm just at the beginning of plantlife leafing out – May 1 prior to my Austria trip. We go through the wild areas, garden, orchard, and greenhouse. This is a major contrast to what the place looks like right...
Augering
LifeTrac is back out in agriculture action. We mounted the power take-off motor on the front loader arms, and attached the post-hole digger. The post-hole digger was from our former, now defunct D17 tractor. We dug post holes for staking our grapes, and...
First 3 Raised Beds
We have a total of 11 organoponic raised beds now. No more clay hardpan. We are taking the chainsaw to some pallets, screwing them together, then filling the bed with straw, compost, a little soil, plus mulch on top. The whole garden will be filled with...
Recruiting a Farm Manager
Any good village will have a robust, low-maintenance agricultural operation. I always dream of the near-future time for us here – of orchards dripping with fruit, trees dribbling with nuts, open source combine and tractor making easy time of formerly...
Factor e Live Distillations – Part 7 – Local Food Systems
In today’s episode, we discuss the OSE program for agriculture. What did we learn so far, and how can we apply this to creating local food systems? We are proposing the integration of perennial agriculture, living gene bank, open source equipment,...
