Working closely with farmers, UVM Extension agricultural engineer Chris Callahan, UVM engineering students, and Heather Darby and the staff at the NWCS program have developed prototypes for small-scale hop-related equipment. The info for this equipment had been posted on a wiki site which was giving us (and many of you) some trouble.
So, we’ve created a new webpage page to view information on the Hop Oast, Hop Harvester, and small-scale hop balers. Working with Chris, we’ve moved the plans for the oast and harvester over to FarmHack, a website maintained by a community of farmers that share information in an open-source format embracing inventing, fabricating, tweaking, and improving equipment and things that break.
We think farmer-to-farmer collaboration is key to improving these and other equipment innovations, and feel that FarmHack is a good fit. Anyone can join FarmHack for free and, in addition to hop equipment, there are hundreds of other equipment innovations posted on the site used by farmers worldwide.