Industrial agriculture allowed humanity to produce an excess of food that fueled the drastic population expansion of the Industrial Revolution. Today, we are facing the challenges associated with this method of farming including top-soil degradation, depleting water supplies, and fertilizer / pesticide pollution. Open Source could help solve these problems, two projects in particular are already making headway. Farmbot is an open source automated farming machine that is being designed to handle many of the requirements of farming. OpenFarm is a project that just exceeded its required funding on Kickstarter to create a Wiki for gardening that helps people learn how to grow for their specific climate.
