I've met them in person a few times while working for a magazine that documented solutions in resource-constrained (not necessarily poor) environments.
IIRC, many of these projects came from actual farmers, not design students.
There's a related project, the Greenhorns [0] working to recruit new, young farmers and support them as they get going - part of that is cutting equipment and labor costs. I chatted a couple of farmers who were using the produce washers built from old washing machines.
Is it a solution for large-scale industrial farming? No. But from hobby farmers up to ones doing a 50-100 share CSA model, it makes a lot of sense and reduces barriers to entry.
> IIRC, many of these projects came from actual farmers, not design students.
As a designer, if there is one thing that pisses me off about my own field, it is that design students often are not encouraged enough to co-create with real stake-holders and end up just throwing ungrounded high-concept nonsense out there.
The Greenhorns and National Young Farmers Association helped organize a Farm Hack event at RISD in 2012 where they brought together design students and farmers. Here's a link to the forum where a lot of the work was posted http://farmhack.org/forums/farm-hack-rhode-island-2012-risd
It hurts the field as a whole - when impossible-to-build CG renders and endless piles of pie-in-the-sky Post-Its becomes synonymous with 'design' it makes it that much harder to convince organizations to put resources behind including design in their planning and production.
IIRC, many of these projects came from actual farmers, not design students.
There's a related project, the Greenhorns [0] working to recruit new, young farmers and support them as they get going - part of that is cutting equipment and labor costs. I chatted a couple of farmers who were using the produce washers built from old washing machines.
Is it a solution for large-scale industrial farming? No. But from hobby farmers up to ones doing a 50-100 share CSA model, it makes a lot of sense and reduces barriers to entry.