But the annual influx of seasonal cannabis farm workers is a thing of the past. Known locally as “trim-migrants,” crowds of energetic young folks would pass through each year to clip buds from the plants, once so prolific in the area’s single-crop gardens. 

Another way to visualize the change to “the ridge”—as the area between the middle and south fork of the Yuba River is known—is via Google Maps or a real-estate site such as Trulia. Zoom in using the satellite view to find an array of garden beds and greenhouses tucked back in the woods; search available properties and note all those advertising that the place comes with a “complete garden infrastructure.”

This is the fallout of California’s Proposition 64. In November 2016, the state legalized the growth and regulated sale of marijuana. And while it seemed to present an opportunity for the silent backbone of this and many other local economies across California, the actual effects of the regulation presented a much different cautionary tale.

In the fall of 2022, Nevada County, which stretches from California’s central valley to the state border with Nevada, counted fewer than 20 canopy acres of cannabis growing across 112 assigned permits. Darlene Markey, owner of Sweetland Garden Mercantile, knew of 25 local growers who registered with the county and tried to make a living growing and selling legal cannabis; today, she can think of only four who are actively growing and selling product. Those who kept their business on the black markets haven’t fared any better, she says.

According to the dozen or so growers I spoke with for this story, the new regulations, not to mention the plummeting prices from the commercial grow operations, have effectively boxed them out. The government has implemented a host of tests for THC potency and pesticides that growers find both arduous and often capricious. Even the building codes seemed targeted at keeping black market growers from making the transition to legality; all buildings on a grow property have to be fully permitted. While this is a standard requirement for any legal business, growers had been keeping their operation under the radar; to comply with the new regulations meant a sudden investment of big dollars. 

“I was excited at the beginning,” says Markey. “I thought a lot of these guys can finally have legal jobs. But it just backfired on everybody.”

Sweetland Garden Mercantile. Photography by Caleb Garling.

Ridge life

Growing pot on the ridge, an area I’ve called home since 2020, dates back to at least the 1960s, when those homesteaders looking to escape city life took an interest in the psychoactive plant.  Cultivating fruits and veggies in the Sierra Foothills comes with numerous environmental challenges—late frosts, blights, armies of deer and gophers—but the copious summer sun and font of springs and creeks meant the weed, so to speak, was a relatively easy crop. 

But in the early 1990s, the area started to see gardens move into heavier production levels. Growers didn’t yet have the legal cover of medicinal use and had to work beneath the canopy in complete secrecy. But the payoff was high. A pound of dried marijuana, which can be harvested from a plant or two, could sell for upwards of $6,000—big dollars anywhere, but especially for a rural area dependent on the ups and downs of mining, logging and ranching.

Pat, who spent 15 years as a grower on the ridge, and like the other former growers in this story elected to use a pseudonym in order to protect his employment opportunities, calls the early ’90s on the ridge a “very risky outlaw time” when “people had to grow a lot of plants for modest yield.”  

Then, in 1996, California legalized medicinal-use marijuana. Finding a doctor who could write a “prescription” to legitimize a grow was trivial, and by the early 2000s, word was out that there was money to be made in them hills. The area soon flooded with operations cultivating their allocated six plants. 

“The county had a different feeling then,” says Pat. “We would take our trim crews out for end-of-year celebrations and fill up restaurants. It was loose and free and even though the old guard curmudgeons would rail about pot publicly—it did attract some bad energy—they knew it was a golden goose.”

The money flowed not just for the local economy but for the seasonal workers. Trim-migrants skilled with a pair of scissors—there is a technique to cutting away the buds properly—could make up to $1,000 in a day. Yet the vibe was much less migrant working and far more party or Burning Man. The average trim-migrant tended to be young, free-wheeling, twenty- and thirty-somethings, from the US, Europe, Israel and affluent parts of Central and South America, using the earnings as a launching pad for more adventures abroad.

“I could make in two weeks what I’d spend in a year,” a former trim-migrant using the name “Conway” told me.

Conway eventually used the earnings to start his own grow operation. He and his crews would spend blistering summer afternoons agonizing over soil quality, staking the plants, catching pests, fixing irrigation systems and all the other ins and out of maximizing the plants’ yields—and then blow off steam at night, post up along the banks of the Yuba River for a swim or to plan their next trip. 

“I saw so many people attached to the lifestyle of growing,” says Conway, “despite the market.”

Preparing for harvest season at Hill Craft Farms. Photography courtesy of @hill_craft_farmsnc

Not that easy

The picture presents as a kind of libertarian, Wild West fun—and to many it was—but there were consequences. Most growers had stories of break-ins, robberies and plants being ripped off; there is the infamous tale of a kidnapping and deadly car chase down Highway 49. I had heard rumors of Mafia henchmen and cartels, and while such characters probably did get involved downstream, no one I spoke with could corroborate the idea they were running around causing problems on the ridge. 

“It was all decentralized and under the radar,” says Pat. “So, the big gangs and the mob didn’t have any central pressure point where they could extort money or lean on people.”

Law enforcement had a similar problem, but it was more active in tackling it. Even though grow operations were legal in the eyes of the state, federal law enforcement—whose laws supersede the state, according to the US Constitution—would spread through the hills (often with a supportive nod from the county) and arrest growers for their possession and intent to distribute a Schedule 1 substance. 

“People we knew went down every year,” says Pat. “Either in raids or in selling and transporting. The county and the feds were aggressive and relentless. It was a target-rich environment. I spent a while on my knees in the driveway with an AR15 to my head. [Law enforcement] loved doing that kind of stuff.”

Photography courtesy of @hill_craft_farmsnc

Seed the light

The bottom dropping out on cannabis growing wasn’t entirely due to legalization; the way cannabis was grown also went through a seismic shift. Light deprivation—or “light dep”—is the practice of planting in the winter months, as opposed to May and June, and allowing the plant to grow only for a short window of time, perhaps eight weeks. Growers then simulate shorter days—in other words, they simulate fall—by shielding the plant from the sun and induce the plant to flower early. (The cannabis flower is what’s harvested and smoked.)

This drastically changed the economics of selling. Typically, the market flooded with supply during the fall harvest. As such, prices tended to be at their lowest. But if a grower was “smart or able,” as a former grower using the name “Paul” put it to me, they held onto their product until the winter or spring, and sold when prices had come back up due to the dwindling supply. Conway, for instance, would bury his harvest in the woods for months until he was ready to sell.

But because light dep didn’t need the full summer to grow, cannabis began flooding the market in the off-months. With less scarcity, the bounceback in price weakened and the price curve flattened. In addition, says Paul, connoisseurs of marijuana, especially those in the club scenes, started to prefer light-dep weed over that grown in natural cycles.

“Yeah,” Conway grumbles when I ask how the technique changed business, “light dep fucked things up.” Essentially, he says, “People became addicted to freshness.”

What’s next

Many of the growers I spoke with have taken the change like any other in life; they’ve returned to their previous vocations as yoga instructors, builders, timber fellers and herbalists. Pat returned to his work as a music technician, Paul as a lawyer; Conway now sells solar energy systems.

Here and there, I did encounter some resentment among former growers towards the lack of public outcry for their cause. Despite the fact so many Californians and Americans abide or consume marijuana, there’s a comeuppance vibe many of them encounter when describing their story. “We were treated like criminals,” a grower told me. 

There’s also overwhelming frustration with the county and state. According to growers, county planners and legislators made appearances of taking their transition to legality into consideration, but, in the end, they released regulations that catered to commercial farms with big investment capital. 

The Cooper Brothers. Photography courtesy of @hill_craft_farmsnc

Daniel Cooper and his twin brother David have made the jump from black market growers to running the above-board Hill Craft Farms today. “The state regulations pulled the carpet from beneath us,” he says.

One of the deepest frustrations I’ve heard is that growers must sell to dispensaries, rather than be able to sell directly from their farms. Reminiscent of the “three-tier system” of alcohol distribution, where breweries and distilleries must sell to a third party distributor to reach stores and restaurants, the state argues the rule is to keep a close eye on a psychoactive substance. Still, it is a tough pill to swallow when California roads brim with stands selling fruits and veggies, not to mention the legions of microbreweries across towns and cities. 

Sweetland’s Markey hopes some day the ridge can be a place where connoisseurs come to taste and sample. “They do it in wine country,” she says with a wave towards Napa and Sonoma County. “Why can’t they do it with herb?”

When we spoke in January, the Cooper brothers said they were getting close to finding their groove in this new world of legal growing, even if, like many farmers, the profits are razor thin. But they came to the ridge 16 years ago to do this and they have no plans of giving up now.

“It’s not just growing,” says Daniel. “It’s a whole culture. We’re holding it down because it’s what we love.”

The post California’s Artisanal Cannabis Farms Were Supposed to Help Build The Legal Market. Then the Bottom Dropped Out appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It may seem pretty obvious to us humans that living under a glare of unceasing light would cause you to turn yellow and die. But some peppers, lettuces and roses power through. A similar protein has been found in Arabidopsis thaliana or thale cress (a small flowering plant that grows wild), but not much is known about it.

Scientists also don’t totally understand why tomatoes are so sensitive to constant light. For other plants, the issue is often chalked up to incorrect proportions of red, blue and UV light. But Velez and his colleagues note that for tomatoes it seems to be a complicated combination of factors including carbohydrate build up during continuous photosynthesis and simply throwing off the plants natural circadian rhythms (known as circadian asynchrony).

Scientists don’t totally understand why tomatoes are so sensitive to constant light.

The huge popularity of tomatoes in the United States’ cuisine began in the late 1980’s with the rise of salsa, pasta and, of course, pizza. Today Americans consume three quarters of their tomatoes in a processed form and the USDA estimates the bulk of that is in sauces (35 percent), paste (18 percent), canned whole tomato products (17 percent), and ketchup and juice (each about 15 percent). The rest — fresh market tomatoes — are the kinds bought at farmers markets and in the vegetable aisle.

By 2012, the United States was second only to China in tomato production as tomatoes accounted for more than $2 billion in annual farm cash receipts. By itself, California leads the world in tomatoes meant for processing — home to roughly 96 percent of U.S. production (Indiana, Ohio and Michigan account for the remainder).

Greenhouse-grown tomatoes have also grown in popularity in North America as variable climates have left farmers wanting more control over the environment. The U.S. imports from Canada’s tomato industry peaked in 2005 but soon gave way to Mexico, which accounts for 71 percent of U.S. imports of greenhouse tomatoes (Canada is at 27 percent), according to the USDA.

But, if U.S. farmers could grow tomatoes that flourished under lights 24 hours a day, more of those tomatoes (and profits) could originate on home soil.

For their research, Velez’s group isolated a gene from wild tomatoes called “type III Light Harvesting Chlorophyll a/b Binding protein 13 (CAB-13)” That’s a long name for a protein that’s a major factor for light tolerance in tomatoes. They inserted that gene into modern tomato hybrid lines — a process known as introgression — and their results showed a 20 percent increase in production.

If U.S. farmers could grow tomatoes that flourished under lights 24 hours a day, more of those tomatoes (and profits) could originate on home soil.

This doesn’t mean that farmers will be growing tomatoes under spotlights all night long anytime soon. That’s a lot of variables to balance before isolating the precise gears and levers. Proteins, sugars, electrolytes and everything in between operate in intricate balances, so becoming certain of why exactly a plant or any animal exhibits a particular condition (like light resistance) is a lengthy process. “It is because of that complexity that we still do not have a proven explanation,” Velez says.

The benefit of 24-hour tomato production probably wouldn’t be for every grower. Powering lights around the clock is expensive and many are happy enough with their production. So Velez notes that the farmers that would see the most gains are in darker parts of the world.

Like most research, learning more about CAB-13 means the start of a new chapter in tomato genetics, not necessarily a conclusion. But the early results are exciting enough that Velez thinks other researchers will take notice.

“This poorly studied protein should receive a bit more of attention in future research,” Velez says.” In other words, scientists are about to shine an even brighter light on tomato production.

The post Scientists Try to Build a Tomato That Grows 24 Hours a Day appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The target demo of Edyn: Busy folks that have an interest in fresh produce but can’t always get to their garden. “A lot of people are passionate about food but simply don’t have the time,” says CEO Jason Aramburu.

“The Internet of Things” has become a catchall term to encompass anything with a sensor and a connection. But the definition of “thing” has almost no limits. A chair could tell you when its joints are dangerously weak, a toilet brush when the bacterial levels are too high.

Farmers with big plots of land have used sensors for some time but as costs of circuitry and wireless communication dropped, so too has the cost of bringing those tools to the more casual gardener. Not to mention the sensors built by Do-It-Yourselfers with Arduino microcontrollers, have opened up a new world of garden management.

One factor that fuels a lot of the tech-and-garden bloom is that while Silicon Valley (and nearby areas) is full of engineers, it’s also full of foodies. Those foodies want new ways to get fresh fruits and veggies and since they don’t have room for farmland, they look for ways to get the most out of tight living quarters. So you get Palo Alto-based companies like Click and Grow making “NASA-inspired” herb gardens that fit on a kitchen counter. When the company asked the Kickstarter community for $75,000 to get off the ground, people ended up donating over $625,000.

For most pieces of technology the equation is simple: First comes function, and then comes form. Take thermostats. People had dials or keypads on the wall that looked roughly the same for decades. But then a few years ago came Nest, which made them controllable from a smartphone. Not only that, but founder Tony Fadell’s had spent half a decade designing Apple’s iPod and injected that focus on aesthetic into Nest’s thermostat and smoke detector. The company showed quick success and Google bought the company in January for the tidy sum of $3.2 billion.

Garden sensors are no exception to this trend. Parrot, often known for its AR.Drones, and Koubachi (neither located in the Bay Area) make slick garden sensor competitors to Edyn. But Edyn is bringing its own firepower. Yves Behar, the chief creative officer for Jawbone and often considered a leading voice in the field of design, has invested in the company and has been the driving force behind the product’s look and feel.

It’s not hard to see how the smooth curves and warm colors want to stand apart from decades of clumsy buttons. And for urban foodies who might have a little more disposable income, the $99 price tag ($149 for the sensor and water valve combo) could justify avoiding the exposed wiring, two-toned screens or clunky software of many traditional garden sensors.

In fact, the only power supply for the sensor is the small solar panel that sits on top of the unit. Otherwise the devices are controlled straight from an app. And just like an Apple product, the company plans to ship the devices in stylish and elaborate packaging — all to make the unwrapping that much more exciting. In the tradition of Silicon Valley hype: Edyn may be the next step of evolution. Could the Singularity start in in your garden?

The post Garden, Meet Edyn: How the ‘Internet of Things’ Has Moved Outside appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Take the soil crusher, or soil pulverizer. Though it has a cool name, this is one of those devices around the range that doesn’t quite have as sexy a task as say, a crop-monitoring drone. Instead, it performs one of the basic, behind-the-scenes tasks required to recycle a plot of land: pulverizing dirt, rocks and roots down to a fine mixture for planting a new crop.

[mf_mosaic_container columns=”2″ captions=”yes”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Patent1.jpg” number=”1″ caption=”A Patent for a Steam-Plow, 1865.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Patent2.jpg” number=”2″ caption=”A Patent for a Combined Clod Crusher and Roller, 1889.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Patent3.jpg” number=”3″ caption=”A Patent for a Combined Clod Crusher and Roller, 1889.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Patent4.jpg” number=”4″ caption=”A Patent for a Crusher and Roller, 1888.”]
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A uniform consistency helps water spread evenly and makes it easier for seedlings to poke their heads out and get growing. This was a need centuries ago just like it is today and; the soil crusher is one of those tools that can be done so many different ways that it’s silly to say someone “invented it.”

There is a whole class of soil crushers that are fixed in place; planters shovel in soil and it’s smoothed with roughly the same principles as a wood chipper. But the big ones are meant for covering lots of ground out on the range.

In 1886 Fred Hempworth and Lou Santany of Aurora, Illinois claimed to have “certain new and useful improvements” to soil crushers. Their idea was to haul two giant arms of rotors along the soil and grind it up as the apparatus moved along. The bit that Hempworth and Santany wanted to claim as their addition to the machine was that the operator could raise and lower the rotors so that the blades could dive at varying depths; maybe just get the topsoil, maybe get deep down and churn the dirt.

In recent years Dawn Equipment Company cited the patent, among hundreds others filed since then, on their own claims around new machines that delivered fluids to the soil and had to do with tillage.

After removing forest or heavy underbrush, these monsters roll through and ready the land for planting.

About a year before Hempworth and Santany, Lemuel Fithian from Absecon, New Jersey, showed off designs for a device that somewhat mimicked the paddles of a steamship. A front wheel churned up the soil while a second larger wheel pressed the dirt back down as the operator pushed from behind. The device sat close to the soil, looking something like a low-riding motorcycle in its profile.

When stacked against today’s soil crushers Fithian’s model looks like child’s play. Companies like Meccanica Breganzese and Seppi make behemoths with rows of grading teeth and powerful hydraulics designed to not only crush soil but mulch stumps and branches and destroy stones. After removing forest or heavy underbrush, these monsters roll through and ready the land for planting.

CNH International, a British farming equipment giant, gives a nod to William Knutzen in a number of patents it has filed in the last five years for its large tilling systems. Knutzen filed in 1887 and employed a delicate description of the blades cutting through the soil.

[mf_mosaic_container columns=”2″ captions=”yes”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Patent5.jpg” number=”1″ caption=”A Patent for a Clod Crusher, 1892.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Patent6.jpg” number=”2″ caption=”A Patent for a Clod Crusher, 1892.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Patent7.jpg” number=”3″ caption=”A Patent for a Soil Pulverizer, 1866.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Patent8.jpg” number=”4″ caption=”A Patent for a Soil Pulverizer, 1866.”]
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“When my machine is employed, the grooved roller effectually crushes the clods, instead of driving them down into the ground,” he wrote. “It leaves the surface in small ridges, which are flattened down and nearly obliterated by the smooth roller which travels in the rear.”

In CNH’s patent, 125 years later, you can hear echoes of the same considerations of how the gang of blades should cut the soil. Even today, there’s no right way to crush the soil:

“To improve the tilling action, those skilled in the art have attempted to change the angle at which the gang is oriented. However, an increased gang angle can cause complications. The increased gang angle will leave large clods of soil that may require multiple passes to pulverize.”

The post The Ag Patent Explosion of the 1800s appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Hunt worried about frightening the animals enough that they crashed through a fence, but as YouTube proves, he did alright. He even landed the drone on the back of his bull.

“He wasn’t too thrilled with that,” he says. “A drone definitely will spook the animals. That’s a huge horsefly.”

Even outside jumpy bovine circles, the word “drone” can get a negative reaction these days. The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are often viewed as the faceless assassins of the military or tools for the police to spy on citizens in their backyards.

‘A drone definitely will spook the animals. That’s a huge horsefly.’

Yet remote-control aircraft have practical purposes. As the costs of hardware, digital cameras and computing has fallen, it’s grown increasingly common to see drones in the hands of regular people, hobbyists and curious kids.

Though he’s keeping the applications playful for now, Hunt, a perpetual innovator on his own farm, sees the potential for UAVs on small and big farms, herding and otherwise. He’s not alone. Long Dream Farm in Placer County, California is considering drones to herd its cattle and such techniques work for sheep too.

And there are plenty of other farm jobs where UAVs could replace humans, horses, tractors and machines, such as crop-dusting, imaging, taking samples and even checking in on pregnant livestock way out on the range.

Compared to tractors and vehicles, drones lighten the impact on the farm. Tractor wheels compress the soil, inadvertently flatten crops and have trouble with hillside farm terrain. Not to mention when crops like tomatoes form tight canopies between plants, the only real way (before now) to do get a sense of the field is by walking them. Drone helicopters can hover just inches off the ground and wield a robotic arm for taking leaf or insect samples.

And compared to piloted aircraft, UAVs are cheap.

“This is just another tool that can be used in the field to hopefully make food production safer,” Dr. Ken Giles, an agricultural engineering professor at the University of California, Davis, who has been working on low-flying unmanned planes for spraying pesticides. Keeping the human pilot away from chemicals as the craft sprays could go a long way to avoid health issues.[mf_video type=”youtube” id=”kK9gVzSYjJM”]

But the operative phrase for farm drones is “could replace.” Today it is not legal to fly UAVs for commercial purposes, other than applying for “experimental” permits. So despite much hype and many promises about drones in American media, the UAV applications are still at the fringes.

Farmers abide by FAA regulations for small remote-controlled aircraft — “hobbyist” rules: fly less than 400 feet off the ground, be miles away from an airport and weigh less than 55 pounds. The first two are not much of an issue, but if a farmer wants to do serious spraying, carry heavy imaging devices or cover a lot of ground, 55 pounds doesn’t really cut it. (And Giles points out that if/when you clear FAA regulations, there will also be EPA regulations for crop-dusting.)

Yet on farms in countries with more lax regulation of airspace, drones are, um, taking off. Rory Paul, a robotics developer in Missouri and outspoken UAV advocate, consults with farmers on the best applications for drones and says the United States is “a good three years behind.” Giles echoes the sentiment. “The advancements in Europe are pretty far along,” he says, noting that farms in France are developing advanced imaging techniques.

But it’s not just the West. Japanese farms have long used midsize drones for crop-dusting. Brazil and Argentina have started using drones on their sprawling lands. Pablo Sandoval is a technician at Agricultura por Ambientes in Uruguay, which promotes healthy and sustainable farming. Today his group mainly uses drones for crop monitoring and aerial mapping. The UAVs build an intricate picture of the land by overlaying pictures and thermal images of corn, soybean, wheat, sugarcane and rice.

“I got the distinct impression they thought we’d have Predator and Reaper drones out among our crops.”

For instance, they can use the chlorophyll index to analyze nitrogen changes to the overall terrain, which then informs the way they’ll fertilize plants down the line. And rice needs a specific amount of water so the images dictate where to irrigate and where the crop grows best. Lastly, they use the images to simply gauge what crop yields will be before harvesting.

Some of the United States’ slowness in adoption is just the natural rate of uptake for a new technology. But the slow pace is also due to a government struggling to modernize drone regulations. Congress has until 2015 to create pathways for drones to fill the skies for commercial uses.

Paul works with the officials in charge of the new FAA regulations. “It’s caught the [public’s] imagination, but nothing’s changed from an FAA perspective….I got the distinct impression they thought we’d have Predator and Reaper drones out among our crops,” he said, referring to the deadly military crafts and without a hint of a joke.

The U.S. isn’t alone though. Other countries are struggling with how to manage UAVs. Sandoval says that Uruguay’s current regulations exist in a gray area that doesn’t allow unmanned aircraft, but doesn’t exactly forbid them either. Still, he points out that the demand to find regulations has not experienced as much pressure as it has in the United States since Uruguay’s skies aren’t as crowded.

Giles is measured when he speaks about today’s regulations in the U.S.: “That’s the limitation for a lot of operations.” But the impatience in Rory Paul’s voice is loud and clear when he talks about them. “We’ve been ready to go for three years already — maybe more.”

Photo credit: ADP Agronegocios del Plata

The post Drone, Drone on the Range appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Sensors are commercially available, but Spence found them too expensive and not nearly as flexible as he needed – “they can only do the function you purchased them for.” So he decided to customize his own. Now he monitors the water’s pH, temperature and ammonia levels, along with soil temperature, moisture levels and barometric pressure, all from a system he built himself – on the cheap.

This is what happens when maker culture – specifically, projects made using the popular, flexible Arduino boards – comes to the farm and garden. From aquaponics to weather stations, farmers are starting to embrace the modern trends of DIY tech.

Arduino boards are perhaps the world’s best known amateur microcontroller – cracker-sized circuit boards that cost about $30 and, say, govern the intake of information or the actions of a motor. They come with customizable inputs that both receive information (like Spence’s sensors) and generate it, like giving commands to a device. Garage innovators employ them to control gizmos that remotely unlock doors or automatically feed the dogs when they’re away. Now, Arduino boards are creeping into amateur and professional agriculture to streamline and cheapen operations.

Ben Shute runs Hearty Roots Community Farm which has a CSA for the Hudson Valley and New York City. When he was starting out, Shute rented greenhouses but they were a lengthy trip from his land. Due to faulty old ventilation equipment, they would unexpectedly heat up, forcing Shute to make the long drive to ensure everything wasn’t turning tropical. So Shute worked with Louis Thiery, a Boston-based engineer, who wrote up the instructions to build an Arduino-based sensor system called “Fido,” which would alert Shute via text message each time temperatures hit those thresholds, all for around $125.

[mf_list_sidebar layout=”basic” bordertop=”yes” title=”Five Farm Hacks” separator=”yes”]

[mf_list_sidebar_item itemtitle=”Automatic Chicken Coop Doors”]Your chickens can finally experience the same comfort and ease you get when walking into the grocery store, thanks to automatically opening and closing chicken coop doors.[/mf_list_sidebar_item]

[mf_list_sidebar_item itemtitle=”Garduino”]Use an Arduino board to build a computer to run your whole garden. Kind of like HAL from 2001, except (knock on wood) it won’t try to kill you.[/mf_list_sidebar_item]

[mf_list_sidebar_item itemtitle=”Temperature Logger”]Know exactly how hot and how cold your plants are getting with this dead-simple temperature logger.[/mf_list_sidebar_item]

[mf_list_sidebar_item itemtitle=”Hook Your Plants Up to Twitter”]Measure soil moisture for your favorite plant. When it gets dry, it’ll tweet at you. ‘Need water, am very thirsty please RT and fav.'[/mf_list_sidebar_item]

[mf_list_sidebar_item itemtitle=”DIY Weather Station”]Measure humidity, wind speed, rainfall and become your own weatherman. Not included: green screen and ugly blazer and tie.[/mf_list_sidebar_item]

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“It’s hard to say how much money I’ve saved; if it’s just saved me from one disaster, that’s thousands of dollars,” Shute says. “But it’s also saved me a lot of anxiety.”

The idea of programming a microcontroller can, at first, seem daunting – a tiny plate packed with knobs, holes and ports that do God knows what. Yet, you don’t need a degree in computer science or electrical engineering to use Arduino boards, just a little patience to learn the logic and language. (This journalist has neither, and tinkers with them.) The software – written in C, one of the most common programming languages – that controls them is free and open source, meaning anyone can change it to suit their needs. But in most instances, coding a sensor is just a copy and paste job of someone else’s work.

Shute founded Farm Hack, a site designed to bring together farmers and engineers, since as simple as Arduino can be, many farmers simply don’t have the time to learn the techniques and would rather consult with a professional. South Carolina’s Spence also runs a blog on Arduino projects. All of them, including content aggregator Reddit, are part of the rich online community that offers instructions, diagrams and troubleshooting tips for Arduino — rather than a dependency on commercial customer service departments.

“I have a big concern that tools will be costly and out of farmers’ control to fix them and tweak them to their needs,” Shute says. “It’s really important that that technology is done in a democratic way — that it’s not proprietary technology.” Some Farm Hack members have since taken Thiery’s schematics for Fido and modified them to suit their own requirements.

With an array of sensors collecting so much data, the question becomes what to do with it. For the last three years, Spence has saved all of the data about his pond and garden, but also general weather metrics like barometric pressure and rainfall. Sometimes he’s running over a dozen different sensors at once. The changes from season to season inform how he’ll plant the following year.

But an additional option is to share it online. Sometimes this is done playfully. Luke Iseman of San Francisco built “growerbot” a sensor set that monitors your garden’s health and tells friends how it’s doing, with Twitter-like status updates.

Sharing data from DIY sensors can also add real value to the overall farming community. This is the next level that websites like OpenWeatherMap.org and HabitatMap.org have taken on, dedicating themselves to aggregating that firehose of information so farmers – or anyone for that matter – can drill down to the weather patterns for their tiny corner of the world for future planting and harvesting.

If nearby farmers are collecting the same metrics and everyone shares that information to the digital cloud, “you could get a really accurate picture of microclimates that you can’t get from the weather service,” Spence says.

Farmers have always been a tinkering bunch, modifying tools and tractors to suit their needs. But now that empowerment has come to the circuitry that underpins those tools. Arduino is a relatively new technology but it’s quickly become clear that the sky’s the limit for how farmers can use the little microcontrollers to improve their livelihood.

“That’s the powerful thing about open hardware and open software,” Thiery says. “You have this thing that does 80 percent of what you want to do, you can search the Internet and find the stuff that does the last 20 percent.”

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