They provide a platform for expert and beginner farmers and gardeners to share their knowledge in the form of Growing Guides – structured, community generated, single-author documents that describe how to grow a Crop based on specific environmental conditions and growing practices. Compatibility Scoring between Users and Guides allows high quality and relevant information to be discovered quickly.
The concept of OpenFarm originated in September of 2013 in the FarmBot Whitepaper by Rory Aronson. The idea was to build a centralized, structured, and open dataset that described how to grow plants based on specific environmental conditions and growing practices. This database would be the knowledge for FarmBot to function, and it was necessary to build from the ground up because nothing like it existed.
They are a global service that aims to break down borders through the open sharing of knowledge, increase participation in the food system, and help everyone become a better farmer or gardener.
They believe that the open sharing of knowledge – especially that for growing food and taking care of our environment – can significantly raise our quality of life and reduce our negative impact on the earth. As a project with openness at their core, they’re striving towards organizational and financial transparency; accessibility of our data and source code; and openness to all ideas, people, and perspectives. Their source code is on GitHub under the MIT license.