I’m always looking for clever tools and tool modifications for the farm, something that will cheaply and quickly save time and frustration, improve production and product quality and maybe even help the farm make more money. I’ve visited farm shows, including one claiming to be the largest in the world, that had little to offer a farm smaller than 200 acres. In contrast, I see useful farm-built tools whenever I visit successful small farms. Farmers have to innovate because off-the-shelf products usually aren’t adequate or affordable for our needs.

In recent years, several new strategies for collaboration on tools have been picking up steam. I want to tell you about them in hopes it will encourage more folks to share their ideas. Three resources you should know about are the Slow Tools Summit, Farm Hack, and Open Source Ecology.

The first was instigated by Eliot Coleman of Four Season Farm in Maine, who has developed several tools that are widely used on market farms. It was supported by Adam Lemieux, the “tool dude” at Johnny’s Selected Seeds, who is also active in tool research and development. The one-day meeting, hosted by the Stone Barns Center, was dubbed the Slow Tools Summit, after the Slow Food and, more recently, Slow Money movements. I felt fortunate to be invited to participate along with other farmers, engineers, and tool industry professionals.

One of those present was Barry Griffin, an engineer who has been connecting students from Harvard with Eliot Coleman. They have been working to develop, among other things, a garden cart-mounted combine powered by a cordless drill. His hope, as was the hope of many others in the room, is to share information globally but to focus on small-scale manufacturing of appropriate technologies locally. 

There were about 16 of us at the table identifying tools we’d like to see, talking about projects we’re already working on, and sharing resources that already exist. Much of the time was spent discussing development of an inexpensive, lightweight electric tractor. Ron Khosla, who developed an Allis Chalmers G electric tractor conversion, was the farthest along in this project, but many in the room had similar ideas and thoughts on particular design criteria.

One of the most exciting pieces there was presented by Glenn Brendle from Green Meadow Farm in Pennsylvania. He has made modifications to Johnny’s Selected Seeds’ salad greens harvester that will make it much easier and faster to use. It will probably be available soon.

In the wake of the initial meeting there have been a number of e-mails with even more resources and ideas, including a link to a company in Pennsylvania that is already making an electric harvest platform called the Crop Care Picking Assistant similar to what we discussed (www.cropcareequipment.com/vegetable_equip/picking_assistant.php). This ability to stay closely connected with ideas over long distances is something that is relatively new in on-farm tool development and I hope to see more farms taking advantage of the networking possibilities.

A project that is working on a very similar approach is the Farm Hack project of the National Young Farmers Coalition. Farm Hack launched in late 2010 as a blog (www.farmhack.net), with ambitions to be a central repository for farm-built tool resources, specifically ones that had already been done by one farm and used successfully. The other idea was to take advantage of the young farmer generation’s comfort with electronic media and social networking to get these ideas distributed and to spark more discussion and innovation. Additionally, a lot of young farmers are coming from non-farm backgrounds, but often have expertise in engineering, electronics, media, and other skills. 

Farm Hack hasn’t just taken the electronic route. In the past year they have also organized on-the-ground events at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, State University of New York in Syracuse, and at the Lee Grange Hall in New Hampshire. These events bring together farmers, engineers and others for hands-on development. Farm Hack events for this spring are currently being planned in Rhode Island, Vermont, and California, and the volunteers who run the project are looking for more locations.

Farm Hack is developing a more complete web site, and has just launched a web forum for discussion about tool development. The next step is a Wiki that will be integrated with the forum to allow for long-term documentation of farm-built tools, whether new, old, or in development.

A third project, Open Source Ecology, has its home base on a farm in Missouri, where a team of engineers and farmers seek to develop a comprehensive collection of DIY industrial tools and machines. Their “Global Village Construction Set” is a plan for  a set of 50 build-it-yourself machines ranging from a tractor, to a hydraulic punch, to a haybine. Their prototypes are being documented on their web site (www.opensourceecology.org) and the plans for the machines will be freely available.   Their work is guided by a vision of a certain model of self-sustaining, self-sufficient communities that may or may not relate to a given farmer’s needs. But there is no doubt that many of the machines that they are developing could be extremely useful to the small farmer, and potentially could be built at a fraction of the cost of commercial versions.

These are just a few examples of what I’m sure are many efforts out there to share farm tool information and to work collaboratively on designing tools for small farmers. One thing that is clear to me is that a lot of the expertise out there is actually still held in the conventional farming circles, and that many of those folks are excellent resources.  Amish farm fabrication shops were mentioned in particular as good resources. If you have more good examples I’d love to hear about them, or even better, share them with the larger farming community through a project like Farm Hack.

Benjamin Shute of Hearty Roots Community Farm, one of the founders of Farm Hack, contributed information for this article.

Josh Volk lives and farms on the edge of Portland, Oregon. You can learn more about his work at www.joshvolk.com.