[HN Gopher] OpenFarm - a free and open database and web applicat...
___________________________________________________________________
OpenFarm - a free and open database and web application for
gardening knowledge
Author : lasermatts
Score : 478 points
Date : 2023-08-14 19:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (openfarm.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (openfarm.cc)
| fimdomeio wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| 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).
| openthc wrote:
| I (we, my company) have offered to become maintainers. This is
| something we are passionate about.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| Just curious what ever happened
| winrid wrote:
| Oooooh Angular 1!
|
| https://github.com/openfarmcc/OpenFarm/blob/mainline/app/ass...
|
| $scope.$watch(). The nostalgia. :)
|
| Probably Vue would be a good option.
| tommica wrote:
| 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.
| guiltygods wrote:
| Man. Implement some spam blocker on your site. Most the
| Guides/posts are blanks or garbage
| Dylanfm wrote:
| 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).
| venmul wrote:
| https://agritech.tnau.ac.in Gets into more information not update
| though but relevant
| kevinlinxc wrote:
| 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
| agilob wrote:
| 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.
| dmbche wrote:
| Somewhat similar project, for animal care in sanctuaries - very
| thorough!
|
| https://opensanctuary.org/
| igetspam wrote:
| I wish I knew about this sooner. I'm in the board of a
| sanctuary. This looks great! Thank you!
| dmbche wrote:
| My pleasure - I've had great experiences chatting with them
| through email for things that weren't on the site (frostbite
| treatments in pigs), they really are wonderful!
| kaveh_h wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Please no, we don't need more community projects getting
| disenfranchised by bored deletionists frothing lists of opaque
| abbreviated wiki policies by heart.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| The website is down for me, has it been overloaded by the HN
| crowd?
| dryst wrote:
| 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.
| k310 wrote:
| 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.
| poutinepapi wrote:
| 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.
| pschuegr wrote:
| I was digging through the code but didn't see where the
| actual content was, did you?
| rickcarlino wrote:
| It's in the database. The project stores everything as
| MongoDB documents. The API is accessible via CORS.
| jarofgreen wrote:
| But then only technical people could contribute information.
| The website may be trying to make it so all gardeners can
| contribute.
| winrid wrote:
| It looks like the original goal was a bunch of dynamic stuff
| (member related content).
| contravariant wrote:
| I think I get what you're saying but I have some difficulty
| moving past the fact that you're claiming it doesn't need to
| be a website because it would be sufficient if it was a bunch
| of hosted markup documents that link to each other.
|
| We really f'ed up the web didn't we?
| monetus wrote:
| "If you want to get posh, have it use Jekyll"
| Lutger wrote:
| The irony is too fine to get lost here, even though
| explaining it is a mood killer.
|
| Its funny I also missed it on first reading, which tells
| me have far this has gone.
|
| The web, internet, www, etc literally was a bunch of
| markup documents linking to each other. That is what a
| website was. Its even in the name of its language: Hyper
| Text Markup Language.
|
| Wouldn't it be funny if browsers started rendering
| markdown and we got to re-create the original simplicity
| (and ambiguity) of the web this way.
| chirau wrote:
| Which folder contains the .MD files?
| mastazi wrote:
| 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.
| logifail wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| logifail wrote:
| I'm not minded to give away my time and effort creating then
| watch others - especially corporations - enrich themselves
| from my work.
|
| "Sharing" is something else.
| dspillett wrote:
| The same could be said for just about any "public" database
| hosted by a commercial interest (or that might later be
| bought/sponsored by one). Using CC0 might seem a bit
| further reaching than some agreements, because you are
| giving rights to the users of the resource, not just giving
| the resource itself the rights it needs (plus some it
| wants, to be more cynical!) to reproduce your content, but
| it isn't massively different to CC-BY which I've seen used
| in similar circumstances (the difference being the
| attribution requirement) or CC-BY-SA as used by the
| StackExchange family of sites.
|
| _> I 'm not minded to..._
|
| Which is fine. But many are happy to contribute without
| caring about the end use of the information. I generally
| much prefer something like CC-BY-NC myself, preferably
| later versions which have addressed the third-party copy-
| left troll issue, but I don't feel using CC0 is deserving
| of scorn at all. Without any licence explicitly stated, CC0
| is pretty much what a lot of people would assume anyway
| (correctly or otherwise), and in this case a lot of what is
| being shared is going to be facts, rather than creative
| works, which are essentially public domain anyway (though
| I'm sure some corproates out there are busy lobbying to
| change that...).
|
| No one is forcing contributions. You spend your time, you
| takes your choice! Of course, you do right by yourself in
| making sure the licensing terms are to your taste before
| taking part, and are well advised to do so.
|
| _> "Sharing" is something else._
|
| This is sharing, under very open terms. At least they are
| not claiming ownership, and the rights given are public not
| just to the site.
| logifail wrote:
| > many are happy to contribute without caring about the
| end use of the information
|
| Would we really call this "informed consent"? ... or it
| more likely that contributors either haven't read the
| licence agreement or have read it but haven't properly
| understand what it actually means?
|
| > This is sharing, under very open terms [..]
|
| Kind of like one way sharing? You give, they take?
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Would we really call this "informed consent"?_
|
| I would. It isn't at all hidden. It is presented front-
| and-center in the terms page, right after the
| introductory paragraphs.
|
| This isn't like IMDB when content which had been given
| over to public domain, hosted on shared/donated resources
| for the first half of the 90s, suddenly had IMDB Inc.'s
| copyright notices all over it.
|
| _> contributors either haven 't read the licence
| agreement or have read it but haven't properly understand
| what it actually means?_
|
| That might be a valid arguement for complex clauses
| hidden deep within pages of legalise, especially in the
| past when we were all a lot more naive about IP issues,
| but to miss this (or just not bother checking) in today's
| world you need to be wilfully ignorant rather than just
| unaware.
|
| _> Kind of like one way sharing? You give, they take?_
|
| Sharing with the public via CC0, with them as a
| middleman. They aren't claiming ownership of anything,
| they aren't restricting other distribution of what the
| user has submitted, they aren't hoovering up stuff
| published elsewhere to power/train a commercial AI.
|
| There are a few things I think might be valid to take
| issue with12, the use of CC0 for provided content that
| you can just not provide if you disagree is not one of
| them IMO.
|
| --
|
| [1] "We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to
| modify or replace these Terms at any time." is rather far
| reaching, though pretty standard and can't affect the
| license of the user provided content.
|
| [2] "By accessing ... the Service you agree to be bound
| by these Terms." - just reading a page, or even just
| loading a page, should not be considered an act of
| consent in that manner IMO, and is likely not legally
| enforceable in most places.
| barbs wrote:
| > _Kind of like one way sharing? You give, they take?_
|
| Yes. There are plenty of examples of people sharing
| knowledge on the internet without expecting anything in
| return. Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and most open-source
| projects come to mind.
| logifail wrote:
| > people sharing knowledge on the internet without
| expecting anything in return
|
| Imagine: creative person shares their output with
| friendly-apparently-non-profit website X, then behind the
| scenes company Y scrapes and uses it, then sells a
| closed-source product based on it to Big Corps Z1 - Z100.
|
| Y and Z both get rich. The original creator? Gets
| nothing, and they may not even know what's happened.
|
| Maybe I'm getting too old for this, but "sharing
| knowledge on the internet" isn't what it used to be.
| Neither are licence agreements :/
| dspillett wrote:
| This is exactly what it used to be. Check the history of
| IMDB for the best known example. We are just more aware
| of the issue these days because of cases like that in the
| past.
|
| At least on this occasion the site is explicit about a
| licince it expects user submitted content to be covered
| by rather than the user just assuming (unless they've not
| bothered to check).
| froggychairs wrote:
| I'd love something similar for indoor gardening. I have an
| apartment with great sun exposure but no yard to take advantage
| of it....
| brookst wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Be the superhero here and add some guides
| brookst wrote:
| I'm not sure they'd like "how to kill _____" guides. My
| problem is that I need help, not that I'm an expert throwing
| stones.
|
| I guess I'll try Thai Basil?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| My experience has been that Genovese, Sweet, and Thai basil
| (for example) will all grow in the same soil and conditions
| (side by side) with no issues, so I expect you can follow
| the Thai basil guide for most basil varieties you want to
| grow.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-15 23:02 UTC)