Main > Food and Agriculture

Open Source Agroecology (OSA) is an an open source collaborative development platform associated with the Open Source Ecology project and combines permaculture and open source techniques + equipment.

Open Source Agroecology is a system for carrying out agriculture where open source equipment is used to assist in integrated agriculture operations. It is an extension of permaculture which explicitly addresses the need for appropriate equipment in successful regeneration of food-producing systems.

The food infrastructure for a resilient community is dedicated to the provision of integrated food-fiber-fuel systems for advanced civilization and resilient communities and aims to demonstrate a best-practice system for feeding 100-200 people with a core team of 4 agricultural generalists, or Open Source Agroecologists. The difference between our work and other work on food systems is that we are interested in an explicit goal of :

1. a full-diet, local, year-round food system
2. economic feasibility for feeding 100-200 people with the stewardship of 4 people by using high, appropriate technology equipment
3. distributive economic nature of the venture – in that enterprise documentation and replication assistance for the enterprise is available.

We are proposing the integration of perennial agriculture, living gene bank, open source equipment, and agroecology – or what we call open source agroecology - towards a replicable package of providing healthy, local food for everybody. We propose community supported production as a means of linking the urban and rural landscapes in a mutual inter-independence for providing food, biofuels, lumber, and other products. Can this become a viable and mainstreamable model for providing needs from local resources? What items of local production can be included in this? If our program is insufficient, what are we missing?

Vision Statement

The aim is to not only heal the land immediately within reach, but to enable others to begin healing their land all over the world. In such a way, large-scale bioremediation and ecosystem restoration can take effect in a grand scale that creates abundance for all organisms sharing the world. At Factor e Farm we aim to produce a template for a Neosubsistent food system, that is replicable, scalable, and adaptive for anyone looking to live off of their land using low-cost materials and sustainable practices, enabling them to be autonomous in terms of food, fiber, and fuel.

Developing Open Source Agroecology will provide the information necessary to empower anyone who wants to be independent of the global food system, employ responsible land stewardship, and eat good food! In conjunction with the GVCS, a set of agricultural resources (living gene bank, livestock, etc) will be used as an "inoculant" for agricultural endeavors aimed towards producing a diverse, year-round diet along with other resources.

Open Source Agroecology enables freedom. In an ideal world, everyone should have the right to:

• eat food that is good for the land and good for the body
• reap what they sow
• abundance
• a connection to their food and the cycles that go along with producing it
• diverse knowledge about land stewardship and food production
• independence
• the ability to thrive on earth's resources, taking what they need as they need it
• pride in their impact on the world

See Also

• Community Gene Bank
• updates on agri-culture in the blog
• Video lecture by Marcin Jakubowski on truth11
• veggievigor.com - example of OSA