It seems natural to use organic and sustainable gardening if you want to have a long-term source of healthy food. Heirloom plant varieties give more flavor and probably more nutrition than the mass-market hybrids. Corn should taste like corn not like sugar.
Open source software is a logical companion to organic gardening using open pollinated varieties. Both free us from dependence on large, impersonal and greedy corporations who are more interested in extracting money from us than in providing quality products.
:D how about a database of seed heritage that includes environment and growing results for each year.
ReplyDeletelike those linux history charts, but tracking plant variety, location grown, growing conditions, year, and the resulting characteristics of what grew :)
there'd be no need to actually store any seeds, because just knowing who has them would enable peer-to-peer transfers.
that would make it easier to find and share specially adapted seeds, and growers could see all the "source code", in the form of a complete documented lineage.
as far as "version control" goes, i.e., saving seeds from many prior years... that is another story ;)
That's an interesting idea. Are you suggesting some sort of wiki-like collaborative effort?
ReplyDeleteWe are in an extreme environment and we tend to plant a lot of varieties together to get a genetic mix so our data might not be too useful.
What sort of open-source software might work for this?
-- Anneliese
i was thinking each grower has their own page(s) for entering and reviewing their own data (varieties planted that year, growing conditions etc).
ReplyDeletebut all the data would be stored in a single database so it could be sorted, collated, graphed etc on Search and Report pages (e.g., Find varieties of squash with this or that characteristic adapted for such-and-such growing conditions... then contact the grower to get seeds :)
in developing custom web applications, i've used PHP, MySQL and Symfony; all open source.
I think this is a great idea, kind of like a torrent tracker for P2P seed exchangers. Any idea how much it would cost to implement and maintain something like this?
ReplyDeletevolunteer labor from a passionate and competent engineer is best if you can get it. i'd estimate about a month of labor to have a useful system up and running.
ReplyDeletefor reference, i charge $120 per hour for custom development. if an engineer is being paid to produce the system, most likely $5,000 to $20,000 will cover this first phase.
once the bugs are out it might take as little as an hour a week to maintain. for the first 3-6 months, probably more than one day a week :)