OpenFarm – a free and open database and web application for gardening knowledge

[rickcarlino]

Wow, I am surprised to see this on the front page of HN. I was one of the main maintainers of OpenFarm back when I was part of FarmBot. As some folks in the comments have already mentioned, the project is unfortunately not actively maintained.

Although it is not actively maintained I would not say that the project is dead since it is still used as part of FarmBot for crop information management.

The biggest thing the project needs right now is a dependency upgrade above all else. It is running an old version of Rails/Mongoid/Angular 1.x. Folks who are interested in reviving this project should absolutely reach out to the current maintainers (I am no longer involved).

[winrid]

Oooooh Angular 1!

https://github.com/openfarmcc/OpenFarm/blob/mainline/app/ass...

$scope.$watch(). The nostalgia. :)

Probably Vue would be a good option.

[openthc]

I (we, my company) have offered to become maintainers. This is something we are passionate about.

[tommica]

Is there a chance of getting a copy of the crop/plant database? I am working on a little app for home use, but finding organized data or apis has been hard.

[beanjuiceII]

Just curious what ever happened

[k310]

I emailed the contact person:

Hi,

OpenFarm has not been maintained or worked on in several years and the Slack group is no longer active. If you are interested in taking on a project maintainer role for OpenFarm, please get in touch through the OpenFarm GitHub repo! And please note, this email address is no longer checked regularly (this is a vacation responder replying to you). Thank you for your understanding.

[mastazi]

On their Github's Readme there is an @farmbot.io address, maybe this project was at least initially maintained by FarmBot employees. Maybe it still is? It seems that someone is still doing the bare minimum to keep the lights on, such as merging Dependabot PRs.

It is a valuable resource and I hope through the exposure here on HN maybe someone will step forward and maintain it.

[poutinepapi]

Absolute shame.

The repo: https://github.com/openfarmcc/OpenFarm seems like it has all the info, and honestly, this doesn't need to be a bloody website, a bunch of MD files with links between each other and hosted on GitHub would be far easier to maintain and extend. If you want to get posh, have it use Jekyll.

Neat weekend hackathon for a group of students or similar, mind you.

[fimdomeio]

I have once particcipated in a similiar project. One thing that I find can be easily overlooked is that a lot things, specially in small farms are very specific to the location and the specific varieties of plants you have. Trimming dates can change by more than a month just be moving a few hundred km. Same with terrain conditions and that could just change from one farm to the next. I'm not sure if that info can be systematically gathered and distributed without being extremelly complex at the same time.

[Cthulhu_]

It can, that's where plant encyclopedias, botanical information etc come in.

Botany is a science, the information is out there. Go to your local library and have a browse.

What I don't like is how SF techbros seemed to try and high-tech solve a solved problem. I've seen some of my colleagues set up a farmbot... the same job could be done with one person, a couple hours and a trowel. In practice, the building manager would go to the site once a day with a hose to water the plants.

[kevinlinxc]

My mom could probably contribute a lot to this, but the need to set up vagrant and git is too high a barrier of entry for a layperson like her. It's too bad cuz knowledge sharing in gardening makes a lot of sense, and was probably part of how our civilization came to be

[dmbche]

Somewhat similar project, for animal care in sanctuaries - very thorough!

https://opensanctuary.org/

[igetspam]

I wish I knew about this sooner. I'm in the board of a sanctuary. This looks great! Thank you!

[dryst]

Cool idea, but the amount of knowledge needed to grow crops successfully doesn't really boil down to a 'how to' format. Are you trying to be organic? Did you get a soil test? What sort of pests are there in your area? How many hours of sun does your plot have?

Point being, there are lots of common skills and local knowledge.

[guiltygods]

Man. Implement some spam blocker on your site. Most the Guides/posts are blanks or garbage

[kaveh_h]

This project could perhaps be adopted by Wikimedia foundation. With a good web ui for contributors to add variants and knowledge which could be stored in the wikidata knowledge graph.

[contingencies]

Please no, we don't need more community projects getting disenfranchised by bored deletionists frothing lists of opaque abbreviated wiki policies by heart.

[Gasp0de]

The website is down for me, has it been overloaded by the HN crowd?

[venmul]

https://agritech.tnau.ac.in Gets into more information not update though but relevant

[froggychairs]

I’d love something similar for indoor gardening. I have an apartment with great sun exposure but no yard to take advantage of it….

[carapace]

See also PermaPeople.org

The thing to look for in this sort of thing is open DB schema and protocols.

[Dylanfm]

I've been building a private app on the side for market gardens (veghub.co) to manage their knowledge, plan their growing season and manage their weekly tasks. It's a really interesting little space which I could ramble on about for ages. When I got into market gardening and began seeing tables etc in books with crop timings, spacings etc, as a developer my brain immediately wanted to build something to help growers think less. Most growers don't want to spend their time in spreadsheet land (although there are quite a few farmer spreadsheet wizards - e.g Dan Brisebois). There's a small demo from a year ago recorded here: https://youtu.be/0FuAF95GceE?t=401

Some interesting aspects that have been fun to code with (the app is Rails + Elm btw).

- one key detail is Days To Maturity (DTM). This changes between varieties, time of year and latitude. A seasoned grower will know what to expect from a crop they have experience in on their ground. Local knowledge networks are important. The best market gardens know their DTMs and will be tracking it, using it to inform their growing on the fly (maybe their plans need adjusting). Doing things like this should be easier.

- an efficient market garden makes sure they don't have empty space. When a crop is harvested or terminated, a bed flip occurs where it's prepped and the next crop is put in (sown or transplanted). You want to have this planned, ideally in winter before the season starts. You need to know your crop timings (DTM, days in nursery, harvest period (once off harvest or repeat harvest for _n_ weeks). This can be used to ensure you have your succession sowings ready.

- efficient market gardens will most likely have a standard bed width & length, organised into field blocks. A grower will have spacings (distance between rows, in row spacing, multi-sow count). It's easy to calculate the number of plants, rows, seeds for a grower when they're sowing (taking into account a safety factor too). When knowing a seed weight you can also calculate a seed order. This also leads to being able to predict harvest quantities, which leads to knowing how many veg boxes could be filled etc and when coupled with pricing data, can predict yield. You want to know your $/bed-metre and use that as a metric for comparing crops and making decisions.

- if you imagine a weekly veg box scheme, that has _n_ customers (shares) of varying box sizes (e.g a 0.5 box, 1.0 box and 2.0 box), with a season from Some Date -> Some Date. You aim for _n_ number of different vegetables in the box. You can imagine some questions that are helpful for experienced growers and also newbie farmers:

  - if I have _n_ acres, what's an efficient way to divide up my field into beds and field blocks

  - if I have entered in my crop plan, can you show me what's going to be in the veg boxes each week?

    - actually, I don't know what I'm doing, can you just fill in all my beds with a crop plan as a starting point? All I know is how much space I have

  - ...how many shares can I support ...how much money will that bring in?

  - if I have a sense of prices of my crops, how much value are my customers getting?

  - At the weekly harvest: we have harvested and have all the different crops with quantities. We have a box scheme composed of all these shares & share sizes, divide up the harvest evenly so that we know what to pack in each box. Usually this is done each week by hand on a whiteboard or similar in a packing shed. It should be easier (and ideally predicted).

[brookst]

I want to love it, but it’s weird. Zero guides for lemons or limes, 43 for tomatoes. Zero for Basil, 12 for Thai Basil.

[szundi]

Be the superhero here and add some guides

[agilob]

Their frontpage is terrible. I literally clicked twice on the page and twice got dead links: the survey has finished, the link to https://blog.openfarm.cc/ has DNS issues.

[logifail]

"By posting Content to the Service, you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through the Service under a CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication. You are dedicating all Content you submit, post, or display to the public domain by waiving all of your rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. All others can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for your permission."

I'm afraid that last sentence did rather make me choke on my coffee. What is supposed to be the incentive for anyone to contribute to something like this?

[hnarn]

They are just describing what CC0 means. I really don’t understand the question, what is the “incentive” to contribute to anything? Some people just want to share their knowledge.

[pvaldes]

Have been there. Done. Next.