Can Open Source Hardware Feed the World?

jfruhlinger writes "When it comes to food scarcity in the developing world, one of the major problems is production capacity: land that could be arable using modern techniques goes underutilized because locals don't have the ability to build or buy equipment. A group calling itself Open Source Ecology is trying to solve that problem. They've developed a set of open source hardware specs for 50 different industrial machines, which they're calling the Global Village Construction Set."

Comments

Stabilize governments first

[Duradin]

Worry about stabilizing the regional governments first and then worry about upgrading them to first world farming techniques.

Keeping those who know how to farm alive and on the land they know how to farm will be necessary to make new equipment have any lasting effect.

Re:Stabilize governments first

[Shadow Wrought]

I would think giving people the help to be self-sustaining would be the first step in stabalizing the government. It certainly seems like the more corrupt regimes are allowed to flourish because they control what few resources the country has. Take away that control with self-sufficiency and you have a better chance to get rid of the corrupt regimes. It's still going to be hard, but I think the bottom-up changes fare better than the top-down. Especially if the only effective way for a top-down change comes from outside a country's borders.

Re:Stabilize governments first

[Duradin]

"Modern" farming techniques requires infrastructure. If the developing area isn't stable, the infrastructure to support the "modern" techniques won't be there or won't last so the area will still be dependent on outside aid to solve their food scarcity.

Seed suited to their area (ie, local) and conditions (drought,heat,pest,blight, etc. tolerant) would be a better boon than machines they can't support for seed that isn't suited for their area.

Re:Stabilize governments first

[icebike]

Actually, when you dig into it, the problem isn't stable governments or the lack of machinery. The major problem is lack of food storage technology, making seed crops the only thing that can be stored for more than a few weeks.

Food storage (of grain) pre-dates farming. But where is is dry enough to store large quantities of grain without some technology and knowledge, its too dry to grow such quantities. If you don't have river bottoms near much dryer areas (such as in the middle east) you need grain elevators to keep dry crops.

You need refrigeration for many crops, and pest control for all crops.

Once you teach several successive generations that going to the market to buy something wrapped in cellophane is the way food is obtained, the ability to preserve bulk harvests for months or years is quickly lost in the population.

If harvests could be reliably preserved, you would be able to feed the same population with half the acreage. Increasing production is the sloppy way to solve this problem and actually breeds more pests than people. This has been recognized in poorer countries in Africa for some time now.

Re:Stabilize governments first

[b0bby]

Zimbabwe is pretty close to that. The regime is eating, the rest of the people are too busy trying to stay alive to fight it. And this is a country that used to export food surpluses.

Re:Stabilize governments first

[similar_name]

No no, that won't work. We have to sell them GM seeds, therefore they have to use modern farming techniques. How would local seeds provide us any money? I mean sure you could loan them money once to buy them but then next year they can just use their own seeds. How does your plan help Monsanto's bottom line?

Re:Stabilize governments first

[icebike]

Also like when the USA takes land via imminent domain, you should still pay the landowner for it.

Um, where did you go to school?

First, its Eminent Domain, not imminent domain.

Second, by definition, the land is always paid for when taken by Eminent Domain.

Re:Stabilize governments first

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, I'm always impressed how articulately people on slashdot can talk complete bollocks - and with references too! As someone who is verging on being self-suffient foodwise, I can assure you there's an awful lot of ways of preserving just about every food you can name. It's not just grains that can be preserved by drying (and they really don't need special equipment, just sun and a barn and a cat to keep rats out): let's see, all the legumes for starters, from the chick pea to the soybean; all the alliums (onions, garlic and the like); every fruit I know of (save for melons and a few tropical ones) can all be dried; all herbs and spices can be dried very easily....and then there's meat. Meat cut thin and left hanging in the sun will dry and keep for years - I think you yanks call it jerky.
And that's merely with the most primitive drying in the sun on a hot day, and it's important to remember that almost no nutrients are lost in this. Other things such as root crops (potatoes, carrots, turnips and other yummy things) can be kept in a hole in the ground or a dry barrel for at least 6 months. And if you have access to salt then there's pretty much nothing that can't be preserved.

I read the same crap from historians who insist that that the European spice trade was built on Europe's need for spices to preserve food. This is bunk. Humans have been preserving food since time immemorial in dozens of ways (drying, salting, smoking, fermenting, candying, pickling, packing-in-snow to name just a few) and with modern techniques (canning, irradiating, pasteurising etc) there is really no reason why any food cannot be preserved (though lettuce is rather pointless to try)

And no, in very dry areas they can still grow masses of crops, just not western ones. Go have a browse of the three volume Lost Crops of Africa - free to view on National Academies Press website - even the baobab tree is all sorts of edible. Don't forget that crops like cucumbers and melons originated in Africa (or other dry areas) evolving to take advantage of the one massive dose of rain theyget a year.
Perhaps you think it's cliche and unsophisticated, but I assure you that the problem really, really is political. I'm not an expert on these things, but it seems to me that in part it's the local corrupt politics of these areas, but much more it's the greed and subsequent nasty politics of the west that has really fucked them up. I have friends from Angola. They tell me when they were growing up there in the 60s, there was food everywhere. You didn't even need to take food with you if you went on a journey, you just ate whatever was growing on the side of the road. Now it's a desert. Capitalism and farming really, really don't go well together for the simple reason that a true farmer/husbandsman/peasant does not treat his land as a resource to exploit, but as the means of his great grandchildren not starving. He cares his land. Capitalism rapes it.

I'm getting off the point here, which is simply that people have survived in extreme climates for millenia. That should be proof enough it's perfectly sustainable and doesn't need access to anything these people don't already know how to do

Re:Stabilize governments first

[ChromeAeonium]

GMO seeds do not require modern farming techniques. Only the herbicide tolerant ones require additional input. Bt corn, Golden Rice, BioCassava, Super Sorghum, amino acid fortified corn, BXW resistant bananas, none of those GMOs require, by design, modern farming techniques. There are even some projects, like Cornells, Bt eggplant project, that seeks to modify local varieties and teach the farmers to save and improve that seed. Quite spreading misinformation about a topic you clearly do not understand.

Re:Stabilize governments first

[TheSync]

Ethiopia has banned GMO crops.

South Africa's corn is mainly GMO.

In which country are more people starving?

Re:Stabilize governments first

[TheSync]

"I believe many WTO loans require the use of GM seeds."

The World Trade Organization negotiates trade treaties and adjudicates them. It does not offer loans.

The International Monetary Fund loans to member countries that have a balance of payment need. I don't believe South Africa has received an IMF loan since the 1980's. Ethiopia did receive an IMF loan in 2009, so I guess the who "require the use of GM seeds" does not apply to the IMF.

The World Bank provides loans to developing countries for capital purposes. Both Ethiopia and South Africa have received recent World Bank Loans. So as GMO crops are not legal in Ethiopia, it looks like WB loans don't require GM seeds either.

The biggest political challenge to Africa regarding GMO crops is EU country bans on GMO crop imports. But fortunately there are hungry people in Africa and other parts of the world ready to buy and eat African GMO crops, not just in Europe.

Re:Stabilize governments first

[ChromeAeonium]

Ah, it happens. Hope I didn't sound too snappy either...I've been called evil Monsatan shill so many times that civility is no longer always my first reaction (I gotta work on that).

Anyway, I get where people are coming from when they talk of the issue of saving seed. It's more than just the terminator genes, which by the way were never released after the public backlash. The point of terminator genes was actually to stop transgene spread, not stop seed saving (although, from Monsanto's point of view, don't think they forgot about that little perk) which was a big public fear at the time, still is, so Monsanto developed terminator genes and got an even bigger backlash. The reason farmers of GMO seed don't save (besides the contracts they must sign) is actually an issue that goes back to the 20's. Ideally, farmers would save seed from their harvest year after year and never need to buy any more. The problem here is that there's a reason why most farmers don't. Most use hybrid seed which, even though you need to keep buying it, is better. It's hardier and more productive, even though the second generation has genetic instability that make it less desirable for saving seed.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the value of stable crops, like open pollinated/heirloom varieties, should be neglected, but at the same time, it isn't so simple as companies taking advantage of people by making them buy seed every year. A lot of gains have come from hybrid seed over the past century, and in the case of developing countries, I think they should have access to the same things that developed countries used to get their food security. Ideally of course they would be producing their own hybrid seed and not dependent on a foreign company though. One really exciting technology breakthrough is apomixis seeds. Basically, some people are working on making a plant that can make seed genetically identical to itself. This could be huge because then you would have the benefits of hybrid vigor and the ability to save seed. You can bet Monsanto won't invest in anything like that though which is why we need more public investment in (and public support for) genetic engineering.

As for any Monsanto rice, I can't say I'm familiar with that. I'm sure they do sell rice seed given that they have a huge market share of the seed industry, but I would assume they sell more than just that variety. There is no GMO rice on the market right now (although China and Iran have each developed their own home grown Bt rice IIRC), and I don't recall hearing Monsanto working on any rice projects, although given how corporations act in secrecy that doesn't really mean much. And I can get worrying about herbicide misuse in developing nations, heck, there are misuses of that stuff even in developed nations. I heard a story once about a guy in Central America, I forget the exact country, who used agricultural pesticides as personal bug repellent. He sprayed himself regularly. Then he died. It's hard to say that it won't be misused. I think working around that, without telling other people what technology they are and are not responsible enough to have (so-called technological imperialism), is an issue.

But yeah, I do agree with you that we should make sure profit motives don't screw things up. Genetic engineering companies are a lot like the pharma companies. You shouldn't trust them, but at the same their products do work (generally) and can serve a useful purpose. But I would much rather see public funds being used. I personally think we could solve a lot of problems for everyone if we used biotechnology techniques on biodiverse crops. Taking the best of what is already there (and there is a lot out there that most people have never even heard of), learning the applications they could have, and basically upgrading them. That could be huge, and it baffles me that there is no GMO prickly pear or chaya or ensete or safou or marula, heck, I don

Can Open Source Hardware Feed the World?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Can Open Source Hardware Feed the World?

[noobermin]

Yes. Look up Monsanto and the good they've done for American society.

And no, I don't eat at fast food restaurants, you insensitive clod!

Simple answer? No.

[Mashiki]

I'd say, ask Norman Bourlag how it could be done, but he's dead unfortunately. But he had a good plan, and several other good plans. I'm sure crazy greenies and environmentalists will come out whining now, but 'green farming' will never produce enough food. And unless you're going to shovel off 2/3's of the population to die. His ideas will be the future of farming.

Re:Controlled remotely

[smelch]

Its spelled Cid Meier.

non-proxy link

[Crudely_Indecent]

http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Main_Page

It's poverty, not scarcity

[swbozo]

Sorry, I take issue with continuing to propagate the "scarcity" myth:

• International Forum on Globalization: Seven Deadly Myths and Facts About Hunger
• International Forum on Globalization: Nine Myths About Industrial Agriculture and Hunger
• World Hunger: 12 Myths (There's Simply Not Enough Food)

Re:It's poverty, not scarcity

[MozeeToby]

Doesn't change the fact that if you give them the ability to grow enough food for themselves (and their village, city or region) then they will have enough to eat. It would almost certainly be easier to solve the problem by redistributing where the food that is currently grown ends up, but only if you can convince everyone to play well together, and decades of effort by tens of thousands of people hasn't been enough to make that happen. So why not try something else? Give them the tools to make their lives better on their own terms, rather than just trying to hand them the solution to their problems.

I can't help but thinking that this equipment would just be stolen by the guys with guns though, exactly the same way so much foreign aid is stolen out of the hands of those that need it most. People say stabilize the countries before you worry about feeding everyone, but I suspect reality would make it at least as hard to do things in that order as it is to do it in the other. Unstable governments cause starving populations, but starving populations also cause unstable governments; trying to solve either problem in isolation from the other one is just going to put fuel on the fire.

Missing the cause of poverty completely

[TheSync]

"In a visit to Ethiopia in 2009, I talked to more than one citizen there who said that the arability of the land wasn't so much the problem as not having the machines to farm the land productively. "

This is completely ignorant. Read here:

"In the late 1970s Ethiopia's communist regime nationalised all land, and private ownership remains outlawed. The millions of small-scale farmers work under licence from the state, and most plots are one hectare or less, which has hampered efforts to improve food security."

Now the Ethiopian government is leasing out large scale plots of land to foreign farm companies, which will certainly produce some work for Ethiopians, but your typical Ethiopian still has no ownership of the land and thus no ability to use that capital to get loans for farm equipment, fertilizer, and seed.

As Hernando DeSoto pointed out in "The Mystery of Capital", every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal land ownership to a formal, unified legal property system that allowed people to leverage property into wealth. This has not been done in countries such as Ethiopia (Egypt is another country with little rural private land ownership).

Lack of private property rights and over-regulation and government ownership of business causes poverty. Enhancing private property rights and freedom to participate in commerce cause wealth. Even the Chinese have realized this (belatedly, after starving tens of millions of people to death with collective farming during the Great Leap Forward).

Poor people around the world are not too stupid, too lazy, or too ignorant to be entrepreneurs and productive farmers. They are simply kept from becoming rich by government. They can solve their own problems if they are allowed to.

Re:Missing the cause of poverty completely

[Antisyzygy]

Private property rights and limited taxes on the rich's income sources also cause poverty because the end results is 1 percent of the people owning everything. Then us peons have to lease it or borrow it and obey their rules on its use. Its no different than leasing from the government, and frankly I think its worse. It hasn't totally happened here yet but its coming if we don't do something about it. True communism would work out just fine if people weren't people, i.e. selfish, and corrupt. Actually, capitalism would work out just fine if the same wasn't true.

Re:Missing the cause of poverty completely

[TheSync]

"Private property rights and limited taxes on the rich's income sources also cause poverty because the end results is 1 percent of the people owning everything."

Note I didn't say anything about taxes.

But you should know that Ethiopia has above-average tax rates. The top income and corporate tax rates are 35 percent. Unincorporated businesses are taxed at a rate of 30 percent. Other taxes include a value-added tax (VAT) and a capital gains tax.

But Ethiopia is too poor to have these tax rates - they (along with labor regulations) push much of the economy into the black market. The large informal sector does not pay taxes. In the most recent year, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was only 9.9 percent despite the high legal tax rates.

Regarding property rights, the US has strong private property rights. "Property rights are guaranteed" in the USA as specified in the Economic Freedom of the World Index. The effect: 67% of all occupied housing units are occupied by the unit's owner (~60 million homeowners).

Now I can point you to several countries where the government (1% of the people or less) owns "everything", such as pre-1980 China, Cuba until relatively recently, the USSR, North Korea. And of course, in Ethiopia, the government still owns most of the land.

Yes open source.

[oGMo]

Open specification is giving the requirements, but not necessarily a detailed plan, for a pole. (And then probably charging licensing fees when someone makes a pole using the spec; "open" is not "free".)

"Open Source" is giving someone the plans for a pole in detail, and allowing them to do whatever they want with the plans, including modification or redistribution (perhaps we could better label this "Free Hardware").

Remember, just because you get can get binaries and happen to have a compiler doesn't mean that "open source" software is anything but "detailed plans" that have to be built in order to actually do anything.

Re:Missed an opportunity...

[chill]

No,

Garden of Eden Creation Kit - Open Source

G.E.C.K.O.S.

See if you can get the Geico critter as a spokes-lizard.

Re:NOT OPEN SOURCE!!!

[Crudely_Indecent]

Apache Web Server is open source, yet the Apache group doesn't give you a working server, nor do they give you the power to turn the server on. They give you source code and instructions to achieve a working server. You must provide the hardware, power and the time.

Your comparison to the fishing proverb isn't appropriate.

Closed source is giving a man a fish (I agree)
Open source is teaching a man to fish (which I believe would encompass teaching the necessary pole technology)

Source is knowledge, not product.

NO.

[Lumpy]

Right now most countries refuse American Corn and wheat unless it has been ground up int a meal or flour. Why? because Monsanto has polluted our food stream with it's copyrighted and trademarked products so completely that other countries do not want to allow the lawsuit ridden crops to ever be planted in their countries. Monsanto has sued most USA farmers out of existence that dared to plant a non Monsanto crop by claiming IP infringement when a neighbor crop cross pollinates theirs. and IF you dare to own a seed cleaner and keep part of your crop as seed, they will go after you and bankrupt you. Most other countries, including the ones that have a lot of starving people do not want this problem there. Monsanto owns the USA, they do not want them to own them as well so they refuse crops and seed from the USA.

Want to feed the world? fight for the invalidation of all patents on food crops.

Re:NO.

[robot256]

Call me a pessimist, but that's assuming that Monsanto hasn't developed a *new* patented seed and forced everyone to switch to it just before the old patent runs out, ensuring that there is zero supply of the patent-expired seed and everyone is stuck with the new patented version for the next 17 years. Let's hope there's some rogue farmers saving those seeds so they can export them for a fortune in a few years.

Open Source Hardware is "way too expensive"

[Theovon]

I founded the Open Graphics Project. Our objective was to develop an open source graphics card. At the time, no GPU maker was releasing specs that would allow FOSS developers to write good drivers. This started in 2004, with a lot of attention and excitement. Being the sort to DO, rather than just complain, and also being a graphics chip designer, I decided that the open approach might be the solution. There were multiple slashdot articles, interviews, and a good deal of hardware design and software was developed.

It's now 2011, and you most likely have never heard of the Open Graphics Project. Also, it's 2011, and most other open hardware projects have come and gone or are just limping along.

Why is this? Because nobody wants to provide the one thing that makes or breaks an open hardware project: Money.

Building hardware costs money. Designing it is hard enough, but we got that accomplished. It took until 2009 before the OGP managed to actually build our prototype hardware in quantities that we could lend and sell, and this was because we got donations from the Linux Fund.

Why does no one put up money? Because it's (rightfully so) too much of a risk. If you could predict that one project or another would succeed, you might invest, especially if you knew that you'd get some kind of return on your investment (besides "sponsor"). But you can't make that prediction, and it's foolish for you to throw money at every fly-by-night project that comes along. And thus, open hardware projects die, except those that are backed by someone who already has money. The problem is that most of THOSE people aren't willing to "give away" their designs. Conundrum.

Some friends and I have some solutions we're working on. Watch this space for late Summer 2011. :)

Watch the TED video

[wisebabo]

There is an entertaining video on this from a presentation at TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) that is only 4 minutes long. And no I've never been.

http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html

Re:John Deere T-800

[couchslug]

Kalashnikovs and RPGs are already made in simple machine shops.

If we actually gave a fuck about the folks in Darfur etc, we'd arm them decisively and the Janjaweed would be dead on the spot.

That's too controversial so we protract their agony instead.

Re:Primitive agriculture WORSENS poverty

[Prefader]

. . . and the other 70%?

Re:The Standard (Circular) Argument

[Duradin]

"Stop worrying about what to do first and just do something. Anything."

Which is exactly how you get into knee-jerk reaction based crises. I hope you've never complained about Iraq II or the TSA.

Re:NOT OPEN SOURCE!!!

[gratuitous_arp]

Closed source is giving a man a fish (I agree)
Open source is teaching a man to fish (which I believe would encompass teaching the necessary pole technology)

I like your analogy. It clearly shows the difference between open and closed source.

Thinking about it now for a while, I may use it in discussions, with this tweak:

Closed source is giving a man a fish
Open source is letting a man watch you fish
Code + documentation is showing a man how to fish

The extent to which code is self-documenting is the extent to which the fisherman gives you hard-won pointers between sips of beer. For technical discussions, this drills home the point of writing readable code and documenting what you've done :)

Re:Grid-Beam

[rcw-home]

My suspicion is that you're going to wind up reimplementing a good fraction of a CNC machine's functionality, but here's an idea that might save you some time:

Implement the 1.5" increments via a ratchet-like mechanism. Allow the tube to slide down the V of some angle iron placed at a steep (say, 60 degree) angle. The drills are placed halfway down this. In the lower half of the V, there are registration pins (probably bolt heads of the appropriate size, machined to the proper diameter and with some taper for self-centering) every 1.5" for a couple repetitions. The tube is placed into the V, hits the first registration pins, is clamped to the V using electromagnets, and drilled from both directions (you have several options for moving the two drills here, but I kinda like the idea of pushing the drill away from the work with a spring and pushing it towards the work with pneumatic bellows). Once the drilling is done, some electromagnets above the tube pulse for a bit so that the tube pops up and slides down onto the next set of registration pins, and you repeat. The tube falls out of the V when it clears the last set of registration pins. Be generous with the hardware interlocking - at the very least you want to make sure one drill is out before the other drill goes in.