Open-source green technology farm helps the developing world
The ECHO Farm in Southwest Florida serves a special purpose. The non-profit helps aid workers in developing countries use the best sustainable farming tools and techniques in ways that would make MacGyver proud.
ECHO chases that goal in a few different ways. At the farm, ECHO workers operate in a tropical Floridian environment that is remarkably similar to the climate of many developing countries. Here, they can work out what crops are best for places as disparate as Costa Rica and Tanzania. After they’ve discovered the best plants, and worked out how to maximize yield, ECHO invites aid workers to come and learn. Once the aid workers have been trained, they scatter like (and with) seeds across the developing world.
That should sound a bit familiar. What ECHO does is operate a farm built around open-source principles. Besides operating a seed bank and freely sharing what are almost certainly valuable farming techniques, ECHO also collects and collates tools that would be useful to aid workers and those they help.
ECHO classifies an appropriate technology as one that matches the needs of a people, fits the materials available, is cost-effective and has a maintenance level that equals the skillset and available tools of a community. ECHO facilitates the development of appropriate technologies by giving them a common home. This is a place where ideas are effectively databased and open-sourced. For example, a smokeless stove may be built with concrete in East Africa, and then once the design makes it to ECHO it is re-engineered to work with ceramics instead. Voila, the same novel design is now equally useful in the mountains of Central America where ceramic is plentiful and concrete is rare.
Take a look at this appropriate technology and seven more in our gallery below.
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1. Biosand Filter
Biosand Filters are barrels filled with sand that cleanse water of dangerous microbes. Barrels can be made of plastic, concrete or ceramics, making them extremely flexible in regards to where they can be useful.Once built, microbes in the sand make their way to the top layer of sand. This process takes about a week and, once completed, the filter can cleanse a liter of water every two minutes.
2. Adobe Oven
Made from clay, bricks, sawdust and straw, the Adobe Oven allows for large amounts of food to be cooked at once. The cooking surface is brick, upon which the shape of the oven is formed with sand. The sand is replaced with clay that's covered in straw and sawdust. The design allows for baking, boiling and steaming of food. The Adobe Oven is heated from below by a rocket stove. The heat source coming from outside the cooking area allows more space for food.
3: Bicycle-Powered Table Saw
Bicycle parts can be repurposed for just about anything, apparently. Using some ingenuous gearing, a broken motor is rigged to a bicycle and a table saw. While one person pedals away, firing the motor, another can operate the table saw. This is excellent for areas with no or limited electricity. Power tools become powered tools.
4. Treadle Grindstone
Bicycles can be repurposed in a variety of ways to do more than help us get around. Here, a bicycle wheel, a cotton rope, bicycle gears and a plank of wood are rigged together to spin a grindstone at a speed high enough to sharpen tools.
5. Moringa Seed Filter
Moringa kernels have the most concentrated vitamin content of any plant life so far studied. Their kernels have a positive atomic charge; water turbidity always has a negative atomic charge. One kernel will cleanse a liter-sized bottle of water. The (negatively charged) gunk sinks to the bottom and clean water can be poured off of the top, and it has a taste similar to mineral water.
6. Handmade Oil Press
In Tanzania a kilo of Moringa kernels will fetch about 1,300 shillings (about 90 cents). A liter of Moringa oil (made from about three kilos of kernels) will sell for roughly 43,000 shillings, or $30. Oil presses are generally out of reach for subsistence farmers as costs can reach upwards of $160. An oil press, handmade from scrap metal and a remanufactured auger bit, was developed at ECHO. It costs about $10 to build.
7. Rocket Stove
Rocket stoves are nearly smokeless ovens that can be made of clay, metal or concrete. This makes them extremely location flexible. Wood feeds into the oven from below the cooking surface (stove or griddle), and the enclosed nature of the stove focuses the heat resulting in a more efficient burn, which in turn reduces pollution and necessary fuel.
8. Tippy-Tap
The Tippy-Tap is a simple device that uses a bit of rope, a bottle and a piece of wood to create an ingenuous hand washing system. A foot-operated lever tips a jug-like bottle that holds water, and then out comes the H2O. The foot-lever system, combined with a small hole in the jug, cuts the amount of water used in hand washing to the tune of 90%. The best and most obvious advantage here, though, is that it requires no running water or indoor plumbing to work.
