The open source movement in agriculture.

The story, honestly told

Around 2015 a wave of open agriculture projects promised to remake farming: open food computers, crowd-sourced growing guides, robot farms for everyone. Most of that wave is dead. What survived, and what grew up quietly since, is better than what was promised: real tools, built by working farmers and researchers, maintained because people actually use them. This shelf is the honest map of that landscape. Every project below carries an activity badge checked against its own code repository, because a link list that cannot tell you what is alive is worse than no list at all.

Where the health is

Five communities anchor open agriculture right now. AgOpenGPS is probably the most vibrant farmer-built software community anywhere: thousands of growers running centimeter-accurate tractor guidance they assembled from off-the-shelf parts, at a tenth of the dealer price. farmOS is the record-keeping platform other projects build on, and its data model has become a de facto open standard. Open Food Network runs real sales for thousands of food enterprises in more than fifteen countries. GOAT, the Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology, is the cross-project commons where all of these people meet; its forum is the best single room to ask a question in. And the biggest community of all is not ag-branded: Home Assistant and ESPHome, where more people wire up cheap sensors to watch temperature, humidity, and irrigation than everywhere else combined. The healthiest niche in that world is irrigation, which is exactly where a grower's needs and the maker world overlap.

The next GOAT gathering runs December 7 to 11, 2026, at Seabrook Island, South Carolina. If this shelf speaks to you, that room is where the movement actually happens.

The cautionary tales

We keep the dead on this shelf too, honestly labeled, because the lessons are worth the shelf space. MIT OpenAg, the best-funded open agriculture project ever, shut down in 2020 after its demos turned out to be staged; the grassroots projects it overshadowed all outlived it. Credibility in this world comes from working tools and honest claims, not funding. OpenFarm ran ten years of crowd-sourced growing guides and went offline in 2025; most of its community's data went down with the servers, and only 340 crop records survived because another project mirrored them in time. Open data outlives a dead server only if someone holds a copy, which is the whole reason we preach owning your data. The archive cards below point at what survives of both.

What these projects actually welcome

Not another half-maintained fork, and not a scraper that repackages their work without linking back. What helps, in their own words: plain-language tutorials and honest reviews, because their documentation is written for developers and "why would a grower care" is the gap; documented real-world builds with photos and configurations; growers showing up on their forums with real questions; data contributions; and small recurring donations, since several of the healthiest projects run on Open Collective budgets smaller than one tractor payment. Our own sketches are published open source under the same rules, on GitHub like everyone else. That repo is our membership card in this movement, not just a link to it.

The shelf

Everything below is badged by real activity, checked against the project's own repository, and swept nightly for dead links. Filter by kind, or search for the job you need done.