Linz Presentation

What is Factor e Farm?

Who

We are an expereimental facility. We are engaged actively in building a real-life village for demonstrating the feasibility of a sustainable , autonomous civilization thati is based on using local resources and global interconnection. By using ancient wisdom, permaculture principles, and modern production technology - we aim to demonstrate that unprecedented quality of life can be attained in a modern, off-grid community.

What

We are engaged actively in building the infrastructure for replicable, prosperous communities by developing and testing the tool set that can enable the effective building of such communities. This toolset is called the Global Village Construction Set. This is a bootstrapping set of tools that builds one technology upon another to produce a limited but sufficient set that can make building of the set, and of entire communities - not only replicable, but self-replicating. Welcome to Viral Village - a virally replicable community development pattern applicable in the first and third worlds alike - which focuses on skilling people to use knowledge and resources effectively. The focus of such an effort is developing a robust economy. To this end, we are developing, optimizing, and open-sourcing the production technologies in the Set - as a basis for a sound, local economy that is capable of trading in a global network of free enterprise.

Why

We believe that we can create a post-scarcity economy where anyone interested can trascend the struggle for survival - or material, energy, information, and intelligence scarcity.

How

Our core team and experimental facility intends to provide an infrastructure where people join the team on a per-project basis to deploy and test the overall Global Village Construction Set. To assist in this process, we are developing a scalable method whereby resources and talent can be pooled collaboratively, such that we can invite the required expertise for bidding on and building prototypes and products. By publishing results and technical designs openly, we are contributing to a collaborative development of Open Business Models - a foundation of post-scarcity economics. We are interested in transcending monopoly capitalism, which enforces artificial scarcity. We are also developing immersion training curriculum for producers, and are offering training workshops.

When

The time to act is now. We believe that we can build a post-scarcity village, with a fully functioning economy, within a period of 2 years. The assumption is that we achieve a $10k per month investment level in our project, and a countless number of volunteer collaborators to organize the collaborative pooling of resources towards product release of our development items.

Where

We are in the heart of the USA, in Missouri, one hour North of Kansas City.

Invest!

We are looking for codeveloper investors interested in using the products of the Global Village Construction Set. We are looking for people interested in becoming active developers and funders for prototyping and product release efforts.

Subscribe!

If you are interested in putting your money where your mouth is in supporting this important work, consider subscribing with $10/month for 2 years - until GVCS completion. This will be the best 33 cents a day that you ever spend in your life. You can also make one time contributions. See http://openfarmtech.org/support.html

Accomplishments

(as of 4.12.09) To date, we have produced and tested the first prototypes for a high-performance tractor, LifeTrac and a high-production (4-8 bricks/minute) Compressed Earth Brick press (CEB press). We are aiming to have the CEB press ready for product release within 2 months.

Why You Should Invest in this Work

This is not our work, but work to benefit everybody. Our near-zero overhead, off-grid operation and completely volunteer effort allows us to commit 100% of all donations and investments into prototyping, building, and the creation of Open Business Modles that people can replicate worldwide. This is a rare level of efficiency - but our strong commitment to the project, wide base of private donors, and non-governmental organization (NGO) status of Open Source Ecology International - make this possible. Moreover, we are well on our way to developing a world-class, Open Business Model development capacity to move the economic system towards post-scarcity principles. See Transparency for more information.

Visual Presentation on Factor e Farm

• We are a farm. We started with raw land.

• We have chickens...

• Ducks...

• Goats...

• and had a Piglet...

• We dug our own well.

• We build our own tools.

• Such as a lathe.

• We built our greenhouse.

• We built our own housing: earthbag...

• And cordwood.

• We will heat it with oil and gas derived from local trees.

• We will also develop a solar power generator

• We have already built an open source tractor:

• for digging earth

• pressing compressed earth blocks (CEBs)

• to make piles of building blocks

• backhoeing

• We are moving on to be 100% food sufficient with a garden...

• Nursery...

File:Nurserfy linz.jpg

• edible forestry...

• plus orchard...

• Perennial vegetables

• Chicken incubator

• We have built a workshop with CEBs

• We have built a Hexayurt...

• Solar Cubicles...

• But our mission is much greater. We are developing open source products and designs...

• Sawmill is up for review...

• MicroTractor is being built.

• TorchTable is on the drawing board.

• RepRap is in the making.

• With RepRap, we could print our own Grafting Tool

• So we can propagate apple trees by grafting.

• Tractor has been built and tested, in Prototype 1.

• We make our own biodiesel for the tractor

• And soon we will have CEB Prototype 2 - for very effective building

• It takes the world to build a village - and skilled people are needed.

• power generation

File:Generator linz.jpg

• Oh, we're just trying to reinvent the economy by local production.