Fri 6 Aug 2010
Posted by Marcin
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.
Fri 11 Sep 2009
Posted by Lawrence
The Table Project was detailed here, and you can see my commitments for the project here. Here is a choppy update of the Torch Tables progress:
Torch Table Build Part 1 from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
I wanted to say a little something about what this one month project experience has been like. Its hard to describe to people just how different living here can be. I understood that coming in, but what I didn’t understand completely was how much the project itself would be the complete focus of my time here. I had grand visions of finishing in a week or two, and here I am with almost all the parts on the ground struggling to get the accuracy on the rails that I wanted.
Forgive the length of the post, I usually strive for brevity.
“It takes about three weeks to get use to living here.â€
The first day you’rr filled with a grand passion to finish your project right then and there. The preceding weeks were a back and forth refinement of the project visit proposal, till you are so sure you could blow through the whole thing in a week, two weeks at the most. After the second week, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll realize how even the best laid plans will take longer than expected. At some point when things stop looking so rosy you begin to condense into your pure objective, The Project. It becomes the singular measurement of success, and thus the swells and troughs of expected success continue, so does your mood. In short, it takes an objective outlook to see past the details and understand how to salvage the core of the project from unrealistic expectation.
“If life isn’t interesting enough to make up your own quotes then you’re doing something wrong.â€
By the second week you’ve come to grips with the living conditions or you’ve already packed up for home. This place is built upon the dreams of the men and women who come here. Each of them leave a little part of themselves here in what they contributed. By the second week you’ve also realized what this place is and what it means. Its a dream made manifest, kept alive by the people who volunteer their time and a measure of their vitae. Like all dreams, the meaning of this place twists and turns until the daylight hours blow away the mist and leave in their place the fixed stark reality of once lofty dreams. In short, you either get it or you don’t.
“All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.”
By the third week you’re terribly shaken. Events out of your control degrade the living conditions, distort the project you’re so focused on, and inevitably it is the nature of humanity to rub each other raw somehow. If your lucky you will learn, re-learn, or learn anew the meaning of perseverance in the face of adversity. It is this forging of the spirit with the hope of self betterment that makes enduring hardship – and in truth life itself – worth it. Our peers and mentors can help or hurt us, but it resides in each of us the capacity to overcome any obstacle if we are willing to submit our body and selves to the tasks before us. In short, it took three weeks to master the composting toilet, and let me tell you what a relief that was!
“I will say though that there is such a thing as too interesting a life.â€
By the fourth week, you’re thinking about what you want to do next – and if another project visit or going home are on the agenda. Either way you go, you wake up feeling liberated. The major trials are behind you and all that’s left is to buckle down and finish what you can of your one month project and look forward to the time left. This place, this catch of dreams, draws forth the most interesting of people. In the beginning you come here for the chance to work on an amazing project, but you remember most of all the people you meet and the experiences you take back. In short, the aspirations of the people at FeF dictate the flavor of the place.
~~~~~
It is still an open question as to the contents of the rest of my stay here. Keep us all here honest with your feedback, as the value in this sort of work lays within its utility to those who come after. In exchange I will continue to keep everyone updated, and look forward to the day my contributions find use.
Lawrence Reed Kincheloe III, On-site Torch Table Expert
P.S. My benevolent Overlord wants me to pump the Torch Table funding basket shamelessly. Funding the Torch Table project and projects like it help ensure that the selfless, unpaid, volunteer work done here can continue. *nudge nudge*
Wed 22 Apr 2009
Posted by Jeremy
To our colonic relief, we added a second composting toilet, a public outhouse with privacy. Now no one needs to wonder who is going to enter the vestibule while performing defecation maneuvers. Albeit temporary, it satisfies our immediate needs. Thanks to Orin for helping construct it!
We also moved the humanure compost to south-west of the hexacubes, across from and downstream of the last stream on the west most side of the property. It’s the blue barrel in the picture below:
Wed 15 Apr 2009
Posted by Mathew
Molly and I built a hand washing station and I put together a shower Factor e Farm. This post is an analysis of the sanitation issues rooted in geography, infrastructure, and human use following Christopher Alexander’s guidelines for design analysis.
All of Factor E Farm’s housing, work, and animal facilities have been constructed in the site’s flood plain among major runoff channels. The building zone was chosen for quick delivery and easy access by car rather than drainage. Development has continued under assumptions that the site is only temporary and that a whole new Solar Village will be built to replace the original site. This assumption depends on the tools and techniques under development.
Mon 29 Dec 2008
Posted by Jeremy
HI, I’m Jeremy, another member of Factor E. I’ve been here for about a month now and I’d like to introduce myself and talk about how things are going.
My background is in multimedia information technology, which I have an associates degree in. I’ve educated myself in and gotten jobs doing several different things like computer programming, apartment management, and now I’ll be working on trying to design and build our sawmill and learn about and help out with the other projects here at Factor E. I’m also quite interested in the local self sufficient food production aspect, of which even this aspect alone could mitigate or even solve many of the problems in the world.
I first came for two weeks in November to check the place out. I was a bit skeptical on the way out here, but after a few minutes of talking with Marcin in person on the way here he seemed like he had a good plan and the understanding and ability to carry it out. I also got to meet everyone here, they’re really cool people. I came here because I believe that Factor e is a very important experiment and I wanted to help out. My reasons for coming here are complex, but if you’re interested then reading the Open Source Ecology plan at openfarmtech.org could help you start to see why.
When I first arrived we were finishing up the trusses and making bricks with the Compressed Earth Block Press for the workshop/kitchen addition to the greenhouse. It was a lot of shoveling dirt into buckets for those thousands of bricks. After two weeks and talking through the plan with Marcin I had made my decision, I would come to stay at Factor E. I left to get my stuff and drove back. When I returned we used the bricks to construct the addition. Nick arrived a few days after I did. With more help things went faster, and it would be great to have more people to help quickly develop OSE projects.
Right now I’m living in the cordwood hut, it’s made out of cut sections of wood held together with a mud/straw mixture mortar, with a dirt floor, and the dirt roof is held up with interlocking logs covered by smaller pieces of wood and waterproof material. Certainly not your typical modern building, but it does the job. It has electrical wiring with several outlets and a typical light switch connected to a light bulb, all powered by the battery connected to the solar panels. It’s somewhat insulated and the stove keeps the place warm when I can get the fire really going. We got a new huge chainsaw for Christmas so an ample supply of firewood will no longer be a concern. I sleep in a nice cold weather sleeping bag in an easy chair, it’s actually pretty comfortable. We had water from the elevated shower barrel in the greenhouse but it freezes in the cold so we have to keep a barrel inside the huts for now. We also have water from the pump but it’s mixed with a lot of silt. I’d like to try building a water filter so we’ll have a constant supply of fresh water. As my cousin who just got back from Army basic training said, most people don’t realize how good they have it in the so called first world countries, and how they don’t realize it until after they’ve lost it. You really rediscover and find a new appreciation for all of the modern conveniences after experiencing their loss for a long while.
My typical day at Factor E so far has been to get up, get dressed, and try to get the fire going. Then I eat something, mostly bread from a local organic bakery, peanut butter, and honey. Then I get dressed and we run outside to work on stuff. When I first came to help with the bricks the weather wasn’t so bad, we had rain a few times and it wasn’t so cold, but now in December everything is freezing and snowy. For the cold weather and once the workshop is complete we’re doing a 50/50 plan, half the day of sitting inside doing stuff, and half outside doing stuff. Just recently we’ve actually had some very nice warm days though.
Despite all of the little hardships of everyday survival it’s not too bad and things are going to be getting better pretty soon. The workshop/kitchen addition to the greenhouse is going to have a lot things that are going to make things much nicer: a large stove with an automatic babington burner to keep the place warm all the time, a water heater around the stove flue pipe to have hot water on demand, a sink and shower connected to the hot water, a washing machine, and probably a big permastew on the stove as well. So if you want to help out in the experiment to save the world and you can handle some sketchy conditions for a while then come down and join us!
Thu 11 Dec 2008
Posted by Brittany
I have a lot to say about where I am, about what I’m doing, about what I’m feeling and about bricks. And no pictures to say it with. So, please be persistent and listen to what I have to say and perhaps we’ll all be the wiser for it.
After two years of homesteading, the floors of our two small huts are still laid with dusty gravel. As a result, a thin layer of dust hangs on everything. The walls are dusty, the sheets are dusty, the shelves are dusty. On exceptionally dry days, when the dust causes Marcin to sneeze and makes his eyes water, he sprinkles water on the floors, bringing temporary relief to his ailments.
The floors aren’t the only unfinished parts of the living space at Factor E Farm. Mice scurry between the abundant holes in the walls, floor and ceiling. A light sleeper can hear them scratching as they search for bedding and crumbs. The one-person kitchen houses more mice than the rest of the farm combined. They do not care that there is no heat in the kitchen. They don’t care because they love the crumbs. The crumbs that accumulate because there is no water to wash them away. The sink in the kitchen doesn’t work and the crumbs sit where they are dropped along side piles of dirty dishes, pots, and pans. (more…)
Tue 28 Oct 2008
Posted by Marcin
People, we are getting into major CEB construction. Today we are building trusses for the roof. It will we an workshop addition to the greenhouse, featuring living roof, CEB walls, shallow insulated foundation, masonry stove, plus sauna running off the same stove. We’ll be digging more soil and pressing bricks the next few days.
This weekend is a great time people to come and help build. Work will include pressing bricks, and if the foundation is finished, we’ll be laying bricks.
Tell all your friends, bring them along. We need 10 or so people.
Nick Raaum is coming from LaCrosse, WI, as well, on Friday night. If you know anyone on the way from Lacrosse to Maysville, MO- who would like to come and get a ride, let us know. Nick is planning on returning on Tuesday, in his vegetable oil-fueled Mercedes.
As far as accommodations, Nick has an insulated army tent with stove, we have one hexayurt (no heat, though), and our cordwood hut as the heated spaces. The weather for the weekend looks relatively decent – 60s in the day, 40s at night. Bring a tent
Please spread the word. I put this up at the Factor e Farm email group on Google. Please join this group for future announcements of activities on the land.
Factor e Team
Thu 2 Oct 2008
Posted by Marcin
We started our first crowd funding cycle one week ago – for October. We collected $1254 to date – not bad. The goals are – 
and our timeline for October is – 
. We’re moving along. The Babington burner is flaring, 
, Bob is here, 
, and the Hexayurt 
is up. One Hexayurt is enough for now – unless we get more people. We’re looking for volunteers, and if our funding goals succeed, we will provide a $400 stipend. Let us know if you’d like to come here. Sasha wrote an excellent post on our work as well. Please spread the word on finding people. Remember that we are supported entirely by volunteer efforts.
It’s exciting and difficult work. Decision forks and dangers abound. We are up on our feet, and feel like we’re making history. We could taste the sweet flavor of progress for the common good – with the global community behind us. I wish I could communicate the feeling of historic events unfolding – starting to tap the potential of a globally-linked co-laboratory. Only a modicum of directed energy – integrated in a well-organized form – can change the world. Please contribute – we are collecting until the end of this month for the October cycle.
Sat 2 Aug 2008
Posted by Jessica
Tomorrow marks the third weekiversary of my time here at Factor e. It feels like I’ve been here much longer, but only in a good way. Every day is a little bit different, but what remains consistent is hard work, thoughtful discussions, days seemingly too short to accomplish everything I wake up wanting to do, a sense of connection to the land and an overall purpose, and in my case feelings of gratitude for ending up here. This has been my first experience working on a farm (I got here through WWOOF), and for many reasons I feel like I was meant to come here, and of all the organic farms listed in WWOOF I feel like it was more than mere chance that I ended up here. I have for a few years now toyed with the idea of one day getting land, but always worried in the end that doing so would basically be giving up on society and getting away to lead a personally gratifying but overall selfish lifestyle. Having seen the vision in progress at Factor e, I feel a lot more inspired to get land, and have been shown a clear example of how I can do that while also working for the greater good, for the transformation of society, and the improvement of the quality of life in general for us modern humans. I can’t say the path to my future is clear, but I feel I am definitely on the right one. The unique synthesis of sustainable, people-oriented technology and back-to-the-land ecological lifestyle will provide a viable alternative for those who feel alienated in the world of superficial plastic economies. More and more people, if shown there is in fact another way, a way that speaks to the mind and the heart and also provides a better quality of life for us and the earth which is the source of absolutely everything we have and need and don’t need, will want to change. I believe to survive we will have to change, and finally I am starting to have real hope that it can and will happen. I may be leaving here in a week or a few weeks, but I know already that this land and the vision here have changed my life.
Sun 15 Jun 2008
Posted by Richard Schulte
It has taken me a while to allow my experiences and inspirations from this weekend at Factor E to gestate, to ferment into tangible thoughts that I can easily disseminate to readers. Being lucky enough to sit down with Brittany and Marcin and talk face to face about what people are dealing with in this world, what we can do, and putting plans into action that can move to empower us all to have more control over our lives, has been a remarkably rewarding experience. We jokingly talked about the concept of “sitting-on-ass” (a reference to the movie Idiocracy), and how helpless many of us tend to feel, sitting around on our computers using grid power, posting blogs about how we can change the world as we often actively and knowingly perpetuate the status quo to our own guilt and disdain. My fellow sustainability junkies and myself know this feeling all too well, yet getting off the grid, if only for days at a time, and more importantly living among those who live for Global Swadeshi is more than enough to convince me that what you and I work for is possible and that we really can do something about it.
So, before I get so much into what we talked about over the weekend, I’ll fill everyone in on what it was like to experience daily life on Factor E. I got in late at night, and thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Crowther was able to be guided to the farm (it’s a bit off the map, get directions when you go!). And just in the first night I was overwhelmed by what a different world I had been catapulted into: reading Ishmael (Daniel Quinn) by a compact flourescent bulb run on off-grid power, in a cordwood house, replenishing my thirst with barrel collected rainwater (the well is nearly done for the wary), and immediately I was engulfed with an abundance of generosity and hospitality by the folks there. Outside I smelled the fresh, cool night air, free of the stench of exhaust fumes and the noise of the city.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of roosters crowing and chicks tittering and goats braying (is that what its called?) and Brittany letting the ducks out of their nest. I enthusiastically took to the garden with her, pulling unwanted plants (notice how I didn’t call them “weeds”, more about wild plants later), and feeling much better than when I do the same at my landscaping job, where I work in sterile, chemicalized, “aesthetic” beds. From the garden, while I was there, we ate broccoli, green onions and perennial onions, garlic, and various other foods.
Brittany and I, the next day, would find ourselves going out to the reservoir (in biking distance!) and encountering an abundance of wild fruit… among the wild grape vines and flowering blackberry brambles, the wild strawberries were delicious and ripe for the picking (we would eventually make some yummy jam thats been a hit back here in Columbia).
While out there we discussed the concept (and reality) of wild food forests, and how many wild plants on the Panamerican continent there are that have been selected for over thousands and thousands of years by indigenous peoples, carefully and with a profound knowledge of the ecosystems and bioregion so nuanced that it would probably escape some plant biologists. This knowledge of wild plant propagation and food forest management had been passed down through multitudes of generations through folklore and through experience in the field. They had encouraged these plants to be self managed, adaptive, resilient and fruitful, and in such a manner as to prevent invasiveness. And, as she pointed out, on a higher level, these humans were entrenched in the environment, such that even the animals around them were selecting for these plants as well, and these plants evolved to spread their seeds through multitudinous means. The implications of this kind of resource management are huge and point to some of the fundamental underlying principles of permaculture. The potential for ecological sensibility, sustainability, and abundance is obvious. Not to dis more euro-traditional sustainable agriculturalists who use less biomimicry, and more row cropping techniques (though i suggest intercropping, agroforestry and wise encouragement of wild influence), as these techniques seem to work well enough. However, time will tell which techniques work better in different situations and for different uses, though I’ve got my wild berries bet on permaculture. The experience of wild food, for someone who was raised in a suburb in the ‘rustbelt’, is transcendental to say the least.
It is impressive what insight Brittany has been developing with her approach to flora and fauna, how she is learning by written knowledge and field experience how to break down many of the preconceptions western society has about food and medicine and the properties of life in this world. Oftentimes her perspective is similar to that of those we learned about in my Anthropology of Food class at the University of Akron, wherein the life that makes up the environment we live in becomes not something to exploit or harvest so much as something to be a part of, enmeshed in. Where we are to interact with it on a moment by moment basis, and what we put into our bodies transcends mere applications of nutrition and science but nourishes the mind, the body, the soul and becomes something to bring people together and connect us on the most nuanced levels to the world we are unavoidably a part of. Folk knowledge about wild food, wild medicinal plants and how to positively and sensibly interact with our environments is becoming resuscitated and reinvigorated, as food and other ecological crises mountingly face us in our day to day lives.
So, after pulling weeds in the garden and mulching some cabbage, we took to the well pipe. On the spot we made a robust, collaborative decision as far as the best engineering practice to encourage a well pipe with a lifetime design, based on immediately available materials. We used plastic pieces cut from a filter they had built before and that had not tested well to fix screens along four 10 foot sections of PVC pipe.
Though I had done similar kind of work before, doing it off the grid was a unique learning experience, and in retrospect the whole deal turned out to be an example of applied ‘participatory action research’. On the ground, those with a stake in the outcome the decision making process developed and implemented a design that best suited their needs, instead of being developed by some guy in a corporate office on a computer (though good things can be done that way as well). This seems to be a well rounded method for participatory open design of appropriate, liberatory technology. However, the problems caused by a “design for dumpster” well drilling rig they used resulted in problems with dropping that 6 inch pipe that we spent an entire afternoon putting together. They have since succeeded in dropping a 4 inch the full 80 feet. This is an important step in developing their infrastructure to be able to support more collaborators on the farm.
The next element to work on is to develop a more sustainable energy supply (instead of local waste veg oil) based on the PV cells donated by Ersol. You can read more below, but to update that post we will be soldering, assembling and encapsulating the panels in a few weeks based on our efforts and successes during this past weekend to research and develop a firm and robust action plan to ensure that the DIY approach will be successful and lead to panels that will have a long and fruitful life, considering the current capacity for fabrication work on the farm (no open-source, off grid solar encapsulation machines that I know of yet!). I and my friend Vince and hopefully others will venture out to take on this project while Marcin finishes the much anticipated LifeTrac (I helped him unpack an 800lb shipment of materials and parts into his new converted silo workshop). Once that and the panels are finished, they can use the tractor to run the CEB press mobile and use the energy to fabricate necessary parts and amenities for the new buildings and, in turn, support more folks. It is exciting to know that the co-laboratory is growing and that it is plausible that there will be as many as a dozen people living in a well established facility by this time next year, built brick by brick with CEBs and ingenuity. There is talk of a root cellar, full kitchen, fancy restroom facilities and a knowledge/resource library with a few computers, and smoke house for preserving widely available deer meat, among living accommodations and garden terraces.
Additionally, they have been in contact with some important folks in the free school movement, and the implications for the experimental blend of learning, living, research, design and application off the grid for the benefit of all is overwhelming to say the least. It amalgamates the ideas of Brazilian pedagogacist and political dissident Paulo Freire and the legendary social theorist and independent marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual, combined with the general drive for liberated knowledge and participatory, grounded and practical learning (this is just my impression). This seems to be a just and sensible approach to educating ourselves and our progeny in the attempt to reach the goals of sustainability and resilience. In addition, to combine this movement with the appropriate technology movement seems to present a formidable partnership in the global struggle for self sufficiency and Swadeshi. The implications and readily possible results are enormous. Both movements have achieved so much already, and things are unmistakably in motion. As different active and concurrent fronts join forces and new approaches and concepts continue to emerge, develop and be applied, the possibilities for what we can create and live day to day will be endless. So for all of you who are out there sitting-on-ass, like I was only so long ago, its time to put our shoulders to the wheel and connect ideas and put them into action and live passionately for the future. Its high time we turn ourselves from passive consumers to active producers, from passive viewers to active participants, from those who abandonedly ride the increasingly volatile wave of change to those who harness it for the betterment of all. From farmers in India to factory workers in Malaysia to miners in Guyana to researchers, bloggers and activists in the privileged realm (not to leave out integral and citizen actors in the underprivileged realm), citizens of the world are crying out for change on all levels, and putting their inspirations, knowledge and ideas into action. It sure is a great time to be an ‘enlightened’ optimist, as those who are pessimistic about the future of humanity increasingly find themselves counterpointed by these concepts being put into action. So, let us achieve a world where the only times you hear the word ‘power’ are when talking about electrical things off-grid and empowerment (instead, participation, decision making, collaboration, etc.) , where the oppressed and the subaltern become mere historical anecdotes, examples of the injustice wrought by the disempowerment and malice of the past.
I can only look forward with ready hands and a reeling mind to further collaboration with Factor E and others in the broader global movement for Swadeshi. So much being done, so much to do, and the movement grows and grows. Abundance and Justice awaits.
