Complete open source affordable system for self suffciency

This is some good info and concepts and really a direction we need to head in.

http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Marketing_Brochure

Does a 2 hour work day sound good to you? Are you tired of pushing paper or making money for somebody else, so you only have weekends and rare moments to spare?

What if you could eliminate all bureaucracy in your life, your costly car mechanic, your housing costs, your personal financial contribution to war? Here's a formula. Be self-sufficient. Make enough money to live the finest life, but still not enough to pay for your oppression. Gather a few of your friends, get yourself a 5 acre suburban plot, install your Fab Lab, plant your orchard, and build a house with greenhouse.

Advanced greenhouse, orchard, a couple lactating animals, fishpond, chickens, and you've got 100% food need covered. Add a microcombine, and you've got some grains.

Flex Fab lab, with computer and open source software and blueprints, and you fabricate your own car, tractor, and other tech toys you like. Now they are fully under your control.

The solar turbine feeds energy to your new stronghold of peace, with a few days storage if the sun doesn't shine. The sun sends you no bills. But you might have to plant a fuel crop, or go to a local restaurant for waste oil, on extremely cold days.

Go down to your local junkyard, get scrap aluminum, cast it, and you have your feedstocks for the fab lab, at the cost of materials.

But you don't have enough money for an advanced Fab Lab? A 3D printer (RepRap) can be made for $400, powered by an OLPC computer. A Multimachine open source drill-mill-lathe costs a few hundred in parts. Come to us and propagate for yourself a 300 tree orchard in a weekend workshop, free to friends.

Need a place to live? A high production compressed earth block press yields basic shelter form onsite dirt – or a legacy mansion if you like. It's the most advanced building method known to humankind, if ecology is considered.

Your junkyard closed out of aluminum because society eliminated all waste by design-for-disassembly techniques? Then you need to extract aluminum from your onsite clays, in a furnace fueled by compressed gas produced from waste wood chips. Forget about conflicts for once rare resources.

Well, it's not really as easy as that. You will need a team of 12 or more skilled people who want to live right, visionary mindset included. After all, you want to build new villages and civilizations, right?

For the rest of your life, do what you really want. Perhaps pressing world issues are a concern of yours? Go ahead, work them. Or just a little more attention to your personal evolution, so that all of society can benefit? When you control your destiny, everyone benefits.

Now show me the money. Your three acres of orchard give $5k per season, just by passive U-pick in the local area. People are attracted to your showcase, and begin asking questions. That is valuable conversation, and at the end you return to your Fab Lab, as you got an order for an open source car – that's $1k dollar value earned for 20 hours of your time. Or, your tree propagation workshop brought in $1k for the day, as your plant stock is abundant. A few small organic farmers in your area are waiting for you to fill their microcombine order. Or, the training workshop for earth block building. You can roll in extra cash if you like, but your expenses are low, and you may have more important things to do. Perhaps providing clean water or gasifier stoves to the rest of the world, at a ridiculously affordable cost?

We like to help others. Low on money and high on vision? Come to our workshops, build yourself an infrastructure so you could live like this, if you have lifetime durable equipment. Start with basics: car at $2k; not bad for a high performance, lifetime hybrid electric vehicle; tractor at a $2k, brick machine at $1k, greenhouse another $1k; flex fab outfit, a large price item, $5k for all you need in machine work and cutting jobs.. Orchard literally free, and all of our gene pool too, if you do the propagation work. And the glazing hopefully comes from bioplastics from onsite, or extruded waste resins. Then you may need some immediate cash after you start up, because you wanted to buy some more books or other exotic merchandise. Maybe maketing products of other farmer scientist friends of yours will do the job as you get on your feet.

As your operations get off the ground, you cannot help but notice that everyone around you is going off-grid, starting to produce other open source items of Flex Fab industry, and those government workers are leaving town as they have no more problems left to solve or create.

Some more links:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/marcin-jakubowskis-open-farm-the-most-important-social-experiment-in-the-world/2008/01/22

http://www.globalswadeshi.net/forum/topic/show?id=2097821%3ATopic%3A501

http://factorefarm.org/
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Main_Page#Working_Assumptions
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Proposal_2008_B_Education_Program
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/

Marcin is quite a visionary! Everyone should watch the interview to get an overview of his ideas. I am looking forward to seeing some plans for some of these concepts. His systems approach is food for thought in itself. He is right that our entire industrial/economic model got off on the wrong foot and we need to start over on a far smaller scale.
Maureen