On Martin Luther King Day, I organized a morning trip to the Hayes Valley Farm. Alissa, our Code for America Government Relations hero, connected me with Lawrence Grodeska, Internet Communications Coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment.
I have been learning about the process of opening up government data, and naturally I wanted to see what this would mean for an urban community farm initiative such as the Hayes Valley farm.
We spotted Ed Reiskin from the Department of Public Works. He was wearing sunglasses and farming clothes. He had come to talk to us about how they improved efficiency and saved money by tuning the street sweeping routes. Pretty awesome.
It was a totally gorgeous day. Lindsey led us on a tour of the farm. Lindsey does outreach and youth engagement at the farm. She showed us the mulch terracing, nitrogen fixing fava beans, told us the story about the bees, we saw the green house and then nerded out at the Solar Pump (solar station for charging cell phones, laptops and electric drills.) Janelle explained how we could volunteer that day - one of the ways was the “Organic Data” discussion.
So there were several Code for America fellows, Alissa, my drupal/open layers/garden friend Patrick, and Max’s friend Paige, who is organizing a fellowship program at Grey Area Labs.
I opened up the conversation talking about how Code for America was learning about sharing data, how the Hayes Valley Farm has a lot of opportunities (and need) to track and tell the story of the value of the farm, and how the City might have needs and problems they are trying to solve.
Lawrence talked about some of the challenges of getting “organic data.” He explained some of the statistical challenges of getting the kind of information people actually want (what I want, for example, compost data by neighborhood - so as to organize some local hubs around compost and reach out to the community about what’s in the neighborhood - digitally.) - He talked about the statistics of waste stream data and how that is tied to density and economics, and some of the privacy concerns involved in reporting energy emissions.We got to share our connections about Patrick’s project “Sharing Backyards.” I was pleased to hear that Max had heard about stream temperature sensors. I explained growBot garden. And then we finally started talking about compost!!
I mentioned this trend I am noticing, that geeks love compost. It’s totally weird, but true. Paige said, ‘Of course, it’s infrastructure.’ And then we were talking about being green geeks. And then she said, “Farming is pretty nerdy.”
It’s true.
So, there will be more geekery at the farm this year. I think everyone was really happy to meet each other. Since the CFA fellows will be back in March - we can do a lot more on the farm. People at the farm are already working on a worm network. Patrick mentioned using FourSquare to do worm bin checkins. We talked about installing sensors on the farm - public workshop style. Max had made a temperature sensor for a compost pile once. The growbot garden folks had hacked an Easy Bloom to make a temperature/moisture sensor. There have been several plant tweeting projects (like Botanicalls.) San Francisco has no shortage of hacker/dev spaces. The farm has needs for documenting the value of the farm. Lots of possibilities.
Then we had a lovely lunch, and Tyler told us about the time that he got to see the crazy computer network of one of the giant farms.
Today I talked to Joel and Talin about how efficiency in farming is not necessarily what we are trying to re-engineer. We *already* engineered the most efficient farming systems for corn, soy, etc. Literally, to the genomic level. I think the trick is building in considerate inefficiencies, cause that’s what we like and that’s where we learn.
(Joel was telling me about Chicken Tractor, which is funny & also a good example of small-scale technology innovation for farms. I meant to tell him how some of my friends in Minneapolis and I were talking about tracking eggs when they leave a carton, and also just tracking chickens and finding their eggs.)
As I think about neighborhood hubs, I’ll be thinking about the stories that leave the farm as plant runners.