In the latest edition of smaller-scale farm tech solutions we uncover a great online community of farmers, a new resource for all your animal health/welfare needs and a super quick way to cut salad greens.
The Farming Forum – a global community of farmers sharing questions, concerns and ideas
The Farming Forum is an invaluable resource to connect farmers with other farmers to ask questions and generally share what they are up to. The Forum has over 20,000 members and at least 1000 members online at any one time discussing a multitude of topics including weather, compost tea, buying stock bulls, farm payments timetables, renewable energy, machinery, precision farming & GPS, holistic farming, computers, useful digital tools…
The highest density of members is in the UK, but there are members all over the world (as you can see from the image) which makes it an invaluable resource for almost any farmer to hear what other farmers are doing and what tools they are using.
Farm Health Online – knowledge base of practical advice on animal health and welfare based on latest science
For anyone with animals Farm Health Online is an extremely helpful resource. It is an online knowledge hub that provides comprehensive info on sustainable approaches to enhancing the health and welfare of farmed animals. They have scoured many scientific papers and combined that with their in field knowledge – what they provide is lots of practical advice and actions you can take to ensure the health and welfare of your animals.
The website covers disease management, veterinary advice and health & welfare issues for a range of animals. It is almost like a wikipedia page for each different question you might have about your animals such as: What is natural poultry behaviour? What is good hen nutrition? My pigs have blue ear disease, what should I do? How do I prevent disease entering my herd? And so on…
Quick Cut Greens Harvester – rapidly harvest salad greens using a hand drill
Quick Cut Greens Harvester appears to be the perfect tool for small-scale salad producers. Particularly if you are running a small CSA where mixed salads are your cash crop, the Quick Cut Greens Harvester allows one person to cut 20kg (~40lb) of salad in 20 mins. If you do a lot of the harvesting yourself, or just have a team of 2 or 3 then this can save so much time and get all the veg for a CSA or farmers market ready much quicker. If you want to hear an opinion from a farmer using it, then tune in to this month’s Farmerama podcast here where you can hear Pete from Sandhill Farms, Utah discussing the benefits it’s brought to him.
That’s all for this month. Hope those farm tools were interesting and if you have any feedback please do let us know! Or if you want to know more about tools we create and use then check out tech.vidacycle.com and find out more about our farm here. You can read about how we got started in our first post.
Image: Sunrise walk to Tabontinaja , the landscape around vidacycle, our small organic olive and grape farm in Chile