We Wrote the Software Because Nobody Had
Six free tools, each one built because the work demanded it and nobody had written it. None of them is a startup, and that is the point.
There is a specific kind of moment that produces farm software. It is not a market opportunity. It is holding a jar you cannot identify, because the label smeared, because it was written in pen, because it was fine last time.
Every tool on this site came out of that shape of problem. They were built for the work here, put online free, and kept running because other people doing this work hit the same wall.
What each one is for
FloraHunter maps wild edibles and grades what you find, with a weather-read almanac that tells you whether a patch is in its window right now. Foraging knowledge is perishable and site-specific. A pin and a grade beat a memory of “somewhere past the second bend.”
Myco is mushroom lab traceability. Every plate, jar, and block carries a short scannable code, and transfers and lineage keep themselves. It exists because contamination is only diagnosable if you can walk backward through a lineage, and you cannot do that from smeared tape.
Plot tracks what you planted, when, and what it actually did, season after season. It is the answer to the days-to-maturity problem: the packet describes some other farm.
Ferment holds KNF and JADAM batch logs. Inputs, timing, results, repeatable. A ferment that worked and was not recorded is a ferment you cannot make again.
Barefeast turns the scrap pile into next week’s dinner or next year’s soil, which is the same decision made at two different times.
Flock does poultry yield. Enter one number per bird and it derives dressed weight, cost per pound, and margin. Those three numbers are easy to carry as a feeling and hard to carry accurately.
Why free
Because the alternative is worse for everybody, including us.
The existing options tend to be enterprise ag platforms priced for row crop acreage, or a spreadsheet somebody’s cousin made a decade ago. Neither fits a diversified small operation, and a paywall on a record-keeping tool is a good way to guarantee the records do not get kept. A tool that only half the neighbors can afford produces half the data and none of the shared knowledge.
There is also a design argument. Charging for these would mean building for buyers instead of for the job, and the job is narrow and specific: one screen, one number, entered with cold hands in a barn. That constraint makes better software than a roadmap does.
The pattern under all six
Every one of them does the same structural thing. It moves a piece of knowledge out of one person’s head and into a form that survives the season.
That is not a technology idea, it is a permaculture one. Knowledge held in a single head is a monoculture with an obvious failure mode. Written down, timestamped, and tied to a place, it compounds. Fifteen seasons of honest records is a different asset than fifteen seasons of experience, and the good news is you can have both.
The tools are free. The thinking behind them is the practice.
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