Belief in Future of Small-Scale Urban Farming Prompts Company to Offer Free Garden Planning App

Farmscape, a company that installs and maintains urban gardens throughout Los Angeles, CA, decided to take two spectacular things – fresh produce and a dinosaur – and create an app out of them. The app, Agrisaurus, is designed to take the guesswork out of small-scale gardening and farming, and help farmers plan and plot produce sites.

On March 12, Agrisaurus became available for anyone to download. I recently got in touch with Rachel Bailin of Farmscape and Agrisaurus, and found out why Farmscape’s founders thought the app would help gardeners, and how the app works. Read More

Farmer-driven Community Embraces Open Source Communication to Accelerate Innovation on the Farm

Flame weeder demonstration at Essex/Intervale Farm Hack. Photo Credit: Kristen Loria.

Employing web-based social networking technology to simulate old school neighbor-to-neighbor information share, Farm Hack is a farmer-driven, collaborative project that develops, builds, documents and shares tools for resilient, small-scale agriculture. The secret behind it all is its use of an open source web platform that allows users to edit all the pages on the site – it’s basically a wiki site for farm technology and innovation – resulting in a user-driven community that self-evolves according to the needs of its members.

“It’s not a new thing for farmers to repair their own equipment, adapt their equipment or design new tools – this is something that’s been happening for centuries on small family farms – but the idea of Farm Hack is to use new forms of communication technology and organization to accelerate that process,” explained Kristen Loria, Farm Hack Coordinator. Read More

Reno, NV Startup Sees Opportunity in High Tech, Inexpensive Irrigation Control Systems for Small Farmers

When Reno, NV based sustainable agriculture enthusiast Eric Jennings noticed one morning that, yet again, his irrigation system had watered his sidewalk more than his backyard farm, he decided that it was time to put his engineering skills to good use. “Water is expensive and scarce in this area, and wasting it just bugged me so much that I started tinkering around in the garage” Jennings noted.  Most of the commercially available water irrigation control systems were either prohibitively expensive or excessively complex; “there was just nothing around designed for the small farmer” he concluded.

Around six months’ later, he’d created Pinoccio; a small, cheap microcontroller with an embedded WiFi unit that could be combined with a soil moisture sensor to control irrigation remotely. Read More

Paper Records Begone! Startup’s Organizational Software Helps Farmers Go Digital

You would think the only cloud a farmer would be interested in would be one that brings rain. However, with the start-up software company FarmLogs, farmers can now look to cloud-stored software to help organize, manage, research, and increase profitability on their farms. Co-Founders Jesse Vollmar and Brad Koch aim to change the way farmers keep and view their data, in the simplest and most effective way possible.

Based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Farmlogs was founded in January of 2012 by Jesse (CEO) and Brad (CTO) a year after the two graduated from Saginaw Valley State University. Read More

Online Social Marketplace Helps Communities Hungry for Farm Fresh Food Connect to Local Farmers

Started more than a year ago by Cousins William and Nathaniel Trienens along with another cofounder, lead developer Gabriel Odess-Gillett, CitySprout is an online social marketplace that was developed to allow communities without easy access to locally grown food, or the population to support a CSA, to more easily connect with local farmers.

The company’s communications director Jesse Mayhew explained that the idea behind CitySprout originated in a discussion about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) between William and a Westport, New York, farmer friend in Lake Champlain where Trienens grew up. Read More

Produce Delivery Service Aggregates Farmers Market Online for Urban Consumers

Meet the future of retail grocery shopping: SPUD, which stands for Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery. The company provides you with a means to buy organic, locally sourced, guaranteed-tasty, weekly groceries, without adding a microgram to your carbon footprint.

It’s like your local Farmers Market pulls up stakes and sets up camp on your front lawn, except that you only have to glance at your computer to make your selections, and everything might cost a little bit less. No drive to a crowded market, no aimless search for that elusive parking spot, Read More

Burgeoning Growth of Startup Accelerators a Boon to Sustainable Agriculture Entrepreneurs

When the Silicon Valley startup accelerator 500 Startups spawned farm production software company Farmeron late last year, sustainable agriculture officially joined the accelerator boom.  Accelerators typically take an equity stake in your startup in return for which you get a little bit of funding and, more importantly, to participate in an intensive three to six month mentoring program at the end of which you should ideally have a fundable business. They’re often confused with the now-less-hip incubators, which generally offer physical office space in addition to mentoring over a prolonged period.  Read More

Software Platform Offers Free Management Solution to Small and Medium Size Dairy Farmers Worldwide

While working for a Uruguay-based multi-national software company, Eddie Rodriguez von der Becke, whose in-laws raise livestock in Argentina, realized that the same level of technology sophistication that he employed at his company could be used to develop a livestock management system to help his family’s operations run more smoothly and efficiently.

The solution that he came up with was Tambero.com, a free global software solution for agriculture and cattle management. Read More