Open Source Ecology

Building Functional, Sustainable Agriculture in Wisconsin

An Interview with Brittany Gill by Rebeccah Kessel (Sustainable Eating Magazine)

“I love watching things grow. I put a seed in the ground and then there’s this plant and then there’s this tomato on this plant. It makes me think of life and beauty and purpose and growth,” states Brittany Gill, co-partner of the emerging organization Open Source Ecology.

And watching things grow she has done, as she and her partner, Marcin Jakubowski, have planted the seeds to create accessible and sustainable ways of living. With hard work, and some help, the roots of their organization are starting to take hold and their powerful vision is coming closer to sprouting into a reality.

Brittany allowed me to talk to her about Open Source Ecology, its connection into the bigger picture, and what she envisions for its future.

RK: What is purpose of Open Source Ecology?

BG: The goal of OSE is to make ecological lifestyles replicable, profitable, accessible and regenerative.
Currently people either have to feel guilted enough into ecological living to make the sacrifices, or they have to have the finances to be able to afford a healthier lifestyle. This makes sustainable living elitist. By coming up with technologies and systems that fit an affordable, ecological lifestyle and openly sharing the knowledge gained, access to ecological living will become a possibility for everyone.

RK: What is open source?

BG: The idea behind having an open source farm is similar to Linux,
an open source computer system. Linux was developed by people who
worked for Microsoft but were stifled by Microsoft’s proprietary
practices and were unable to implement any of their creative ideas.
Instead of feeling limited by the Microsoft’s system, they decided to
develop another, one in which the information and programs were free.
Having such an accessible system created a wide variety of individuals
working on the project. This makes Linux a computer system that is
constantly improving with no limitations on who can access or develop
new programs and information. Hence the concept, open source.

Open Source Ecology is taking this concept and moving it into the
field of agriculture. By starting OSE, information on how to have
functional, sustainable agriculture is being gathered. Lots of people
would like to grow their own food, or live in an ecologically
sustainable system, but have no idea on how to attain land at a fair
price, how to get their produce to people, or how to grow foods that
will sustain them year round.

OSE is open source in the sense of it documenting working
information and allowing for hands-on experience in the building of its
farm. OSE is also open source in the sense that the food grown on the
farm is being used to raise funds to create a sustainable training
center in which people can come and work on open source projects, such
as designing farm machinery.

Currently, there exist two kinds of farm
machinery: huge, for large-scale farming, and small, for personal
gardening. Large machinery is expensive; farmers often have to go into
debt in order to obtain it, and need to pay others in order to fix it.
It is not ecological or sustainable. Much of the smaller farm machinery
is great, but not large enough for medium-sized farms that want to feed
people on a large scale, like the Madison area. As students come and
work on open source projects, collaborative development of new
technologies occurs helping create new, sustainable, economic models.

RK: How did Open Source Ecology begin?

BG: Marcin believes strongly in the philosophy of open source and
decided this fall to start an organization to foster the growth of this
system. I saw that my interest in health, agriculture and ecological
lifestyles fit into this emerging vision. In need of finances and
experience to help this project grow, we decided to produce salsa. We
all have to make money to survive, so why not make it in an
ecologically and sustainable way? So, we decided to grow produce to
make salsa, and sell the salsa to sustain ourselves financially.

We went to a party, and met a man who was doing a CSA (community
shared agricultural) on a retired organic farmer’s land who was just
interested in having his land be used in exchange for some produce. We
called up Farmer Jim and now he is letting us use a section of his land
for the season. Farmer Jim has some tools that we have been using and
we talk to people to borrow more tools or acquire more land.

Our other plot (in Dunn, Wis.) we acquired just by
approaching the owner and asking if he knew of any land we could use.
He offered his. The resources are out there. It’s a matter of finding
people who have the same philosophies as you and asking for what you
need.

RK: What is Open Source Ecology currently growing?

BG: Right now, tomatoes, squash and popcorn are our
production crops, but we are also growing Jerusalem artichokes, garlic,
onions, carrots and pumpkins. We are talking about harvesting the
pumpkin seeds and possibly pressing them into oil. Currently, CSAs
focus mostly on foods that can be utilized through the summer season.
We are growing white northern beans, soybeans, amaranth, buckwheat and
millet to experiment with growing locally produced food for a
year-round diet.

RK: How is Open Source Ecology bringing the local community into the project?

BG: Right now, we need help with the tomatoes. People tell me they
have too many tomatoes with six plants — I have two thousand! It’s easy
to grow a lot of food. It’s easy to grow high quality foods even
though, as a culture, we have such poor food sources. If anyone wants
to help, they can have all of the tomatoes they can eat and can.

We have approached community groups and churches
asking them to get involved. One idea is to have a farmer’s market
right at the church. Also, we want these groups to come and work, take
what they grow and sell it as fundraisers. Remember in school when we
would sell those awful pizzas or those candy bars as fundraisers? Why
not use something healthy and local instead? It not only helps us and
the community group financially, it also helps get our food out to the
public.

RK: How can people become involved with Open Source Ecology?

We are looking for a diesel truck. We are looking
for a certified kitchen where we can process foods and for someone who
has some legal knowledge about marketing locally-made and processed
food items. And we can always use help on the farm! Working on the farm
is a great way to learn about agricultural and organic farming, get
exercise outdoors, and acquire free produce. We have open work days on
both Sundays and Thursdays and anyone is welcome to help.

——————

To contact Brittany Gill for more information about Open Source Ecology, e-mail her at brittany@sourceopen.org, or call her at 608-301-0190.

You can e-mail Marcin Jakubowski at marcin@sourceopen.org , or call him at 608-358-9062.

These days we are struggling with finding a way to communicate the message of  the work at openfarmtech.org. Brittany and Vinay Gupta (hexayurt.com) have been slashing through the thicket of expression choices to narrow down the message so it could be understood by others. The goal is to attract interest in a few, dedicated co-developers. I am convinced that such co-developers exist, yet, for some reason, they are not appearing as I would expect they should.

The website at openfarmtech.org started as a finite but comprehensive Global Village Construction Set. This concept started earlies at the Worknets.org wiki, under http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?OpenSourceEcology. It was there that some of the technology on the Compressed Earth Block Press and the Sawmill were posted. The focus is technologies that are necessary for the infrastructure of a Global Village community, akin to Franz Nahrada’s concept at globalvillages.info.

We are talking about real life communities, and what it would take to
implement them in practice. The infrastructure is the first step:
food, energy, housing, mobility, internet, and technology. There are
basics that are needed, and the internal knowhow is necessary to
provide these needs in a self-sufficient fashion, if we are talking
about making a better world.

One would think that such a program would be supported by a good
number of people, but the reality is that it is difficult to have
people actually develop the necessary infrastructure.

What is needed is affordable and practical solar energy systems.
Affordable and low maintenance year-round growing structures. Vehicles
produced by decentralized industry – in these same Global Villages.
Fuels, such as alcohol or compressed biogas that are produced onsite.

All this requires technology, but the truth is, all these items can be
produced in a land-based global village, not be large corporations or
huge factories in big cities. This is the premise, and it can be
proven that all this technology is capable of being decentralized,
such that unprecedented prosperity for all is the result.

On top of this, make these items 10 times less expensive, and you have
to work 10 times less – or have 10 times the amount of freedom. That
is a simple concept.

But how is one to organize a core team of dedicated developers for
this effort? I mean the types of people who have organizational skills
and engineering skills to pull this off. Are these people so rare?
Yes, but there are some. The rewards, however, are great – the
potential of creating replicable, mainstreamable, transformative
communities. They can be in existing cities or in the countryside,
anywhere – but small enterprise and right livelihood have to be the
economic foundation.

The development of the Global Village Construction Set is almost
synonymous with developing a right livelihood base for participants.
If people are tired of a crap job, they can check out- and here would
be a process for checking into another life. Real work, real products.

It just takes defining a few products, and making sure they are
essential. It takes optimization of the business models around these
products to generate millions of jobs for potential adopters. If the
product is a solar turbine system, such as proposed at
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Solar_Turbine_CHP_System, then
there are millions of potential jobs created worldwide.

Given the above considerations, it would seem that people would flock
to develop such products collaboratively. But, it seems that society
is presently is such a sad state that very few have the skills,
energy, vision, or leisure to take on such a task. We are slaves by
circumstance.

The work required to take place in order to develop and deploy the
products at openfarmtech.org is rigorous. It means going through a
careful research process to distill the product line and to deploy it
effectively. That’s a research project worth many PhDs, so it requires
a team. But, if I do not find that team, then I will continue as I am
now, nibbling bit by bit at the problem until it is solved. After all,
the potential is replicative and transformative.

Imagine a village with buildings of dirt (CEB) with year-round greenhouses (sawmill, CEB, bioplastics from local trees), with all
facility energy produced by a solar turbine, where people drive hybrid cars with car bodies (bioplastics) made from local weeds, with critical motors and metal structures (aluminum) extracted from on-site clay, which are fueled by alcohol produced on-site, on a wireless
network linked to the greater world. That’s just a sampling of the technology base. Food, energy, housing sufficiency. There are no poor among us – because we are all evolving human beings and farmer scientists.

500 Plus Plan (pdf)

The basic OSE model is shown below:

The cornerstone of Open Source Ecology’s program for transformative economics is the 500 Plus Plan. This is a plan for producing a financial incentive in order to attract new Fellows on demand. This Plan is the development of an integrated, primarily agricultural product package that may be deployed by people joining OSE on a month’s time frame in order to capture a business opportunity from a basic farmer’s market. A farmer’s market is perhaps the lowest entry barrier venue for free enterprise worldwide, and, for purposes of OSE, a business opportunity that may be harnessed on-demand to meet goals of expansion. The opportunity is at least $500 per day at market, which is a proven figure for many vendors. New Fellows, by going to one farmer’s market per week, are thus able to earn during their stay at OSE, and moreover, to contribute 25% to the research program Development Fund. The innovation here lies in the 500 Plus Plan, which is designed to produce high value with minimum time commitment. This is feasible when a rigorous program for such value generation is devised. It must be based on the right product choice, professional techniques, and optimized ergonomics. It is designed such that it requires a time commitment of 1 hour per day, 5 days per week, plus 1 day at market. This constitutes a financing mechanism for Fellows that takes little time away from the core of our mission: open source research and development.

Continue to read (pdf) 

by Marcin Jakubowski

The present challenge is to develop a working model of the Regenerative Island Project as described under Mission. In the last couple of years, this concept refined itself to a replicable open source enterprise community, in the form of an Open Source Research and Development Center. This is an entity that may be understood by the greater mainstream world, though its essence is far ahead of any institution known to humankind. This is because of its radical teleology: to make a viable sub-economy – an economy within the mainstream – operating on principles of unrestrained, open source development.

The Open Source Research and Development Center (R&D Center) and Enterprise Incubator

The R&D Center is an applied research center that develops products, business models for product distribution, and tests the models in-house by actually engaging in these business models. The focus of product development is to enable the replication of production by developing the infrastructure surrounding a particular product, thereby addressing the capitalization of business replication. OSE’s aim is to devise a technological pattern language and flexible production infrastructures – those with as little specialized equipment as possible- such that startup costs are reduced.

These are not new ideas. The case has already been demonstrated that flexible manufacturing is a viable route of manufacturing, but that highly-specialized mass production has gained dominance. This is not due to the superiority of mass production, but due to the control of monopolizing elites.

The open source R&D Center for product development is a unique contribution to human enterprise. We do not know of any precedent of an institution that works collectively as such, fueled by an idealism of human progress. The proposed Business Incubator model pushes limits even further. The concept here is that OSE provides sweat equity means, or full startup capitalization assistance, for the most advanced business concepts. As such, it brings out people with adealistic goals and provides them with all the hardware and knowledge necessary for success.

The concept behind the business incubator’s capitalization program is simple: all startups do not require money, but the goods that money can buy. If those goods may be produced via open source flexible fabrication, or services provided via os consulting, then such is a successful means to startup.

The central feature of the Incubator must therefore be an infrastructure of resources, feedstocks, tools, and machines to produce the resources, feedstocks, tools, machines, and indeed, infrastructures, for the startup enterprise. The innovative aspect of the OSE Enterprise Incubator program is that the Fellows interested in startup have the opportunity to build the entire infrastructure as part of their training program, during a period of time sufficiently long to address all aspects of a proposed startup.

The financing mechanism for startup is revolutionary. We mentioned sweat equity. Indeed, the Fellow interested in startup is advised to take advantage of the 500 Plus Plan to finance their stay and contribute the stipulated 25% for OSE services. OSE gains the additional benefit of enterprise development and testing by the Fellow, and all working models enter the pool of open source know-how that may be tapped by others for promoting ethical, ecologically friendly enterprise.

For example, if the business opportunity sought is an integrated, year-round greenhouse and farm franchise operation, then the capitalization required includes fruit trees, greenhouses, buildings, water supply, and animal stock. OSE’s capitalization services may include: (1) the Fellow building a sawmill, CEB, and plastic extruder in our flexible workshop during their stay, to take care of greenhouse and other building needs; or, the Fellow leases our equipment; (2) the Fellow grows out from seed or propagates all fruit, berry, and nut trees from the OSE genetic pool of resources; (3) additionally, the Fellow builds a freeze-dried juice powder machine, microcombine, agricultural spader, hammer mill, during their stay- devices necessary for state-of-art soil proparation, harvesting, making mulch, and preserving foods with most nutrition; (4) the Fellow builds solar concentrators, engine cycle, ancillary stove, and designs a heat storage system; (5) the Fellow combines effort with other Fellows to fund land acquisition, or OSE taps its land resources to grant permanent stewardship to the Fellow; (6) the Fellow builds their own OSCar for transportation needs during their stay; (7) the Fellow may choose to incubate a flock of fowl, adopt some goats, or other animals during their stay; (8) the Fellow may make their fuel alcohol distillation apparatus (9) the Fellow becomes a fully enabled land steward, and thus quits their contract with the military-industrial state.

The above example shows that it may take two years to complete the preparation for an integrated farm franchise- fruit and nut trees may take two years to become ready for planting out. Each technical device or item may take approximately 30 days of full time work to produce from existing open source documentation. This indicated that approximately one year would be spent in the shop fabricating the necessary technologies. Together with learning operation, techniques, plant and animal propagation- two years may suffice for a crash course. However, given the depth of the immersion experience, the Fellow will be in full control of their technological and biological environment, since the Fellow produced it all by theirself.

The costs involved are only material costs. Each device may cost approximately $1000 in materials. The Fellow has a choice of how to fund this. OSE may tap its Development Fund and lease the final product to the Fellow. Or, the Fellow may purchase materials from their own funds. Another option is to tap resource development based on the nonprofit nature of OSE work. Initiative may also be taken to generate value via barter or other means. Given that OSE has land, produce, and a productive infrastructure, a large number of productive activities may be tapped to generate value in return for other value. The economy of the OSE R&D Center and Enterprise Incubator is one of abundance, and many creative means may be taken.

This plan shows the work to be done in the period from April 2006 to April   2007.   The   majority   of   new   developments   revolves   around   the development of novel social technology and a flexible hardware technology which we are proposing herein. Technical developments include energy,
vehicle, and farm equipment infrastructure. This is part of background developments of an integrated land-based enterprise community.

 OSE Yearly Plan — April 2006/April 2007 (pdf)

We are forming an enterprise community focusing on open source technology for sustainable living. Part A is a review of OSE’s first season at our land-based facility in Osborn, MO. The facility is leased and operated by Marcin and Brittany. Corresponding future direction based on the experience gained is described in Part B.

OSE Progress Report for 2005/2006

Open Source Ecology Sustainable Investment Group LLC is a for-profit company used to fund the non-profit company Open Source Ecology, Inc. It will raise money through this offering to acquire land and build a hydroponic lettuce greenhouse. The Company will sell greenhouse produce and sustainably-harvested lumber. The company will also engage in marketing of other sustainable products from its affiliates. Here’s the financial offering plan (s.c.o.r.)

OSE SIG S.C.O.R.