About Us
Granby Ridge Farm not for profit sustainable resource management project was
conceived out of the desire to leverage natural geodynamics in order to add efficiencies
to farm based automation and control systems. In addition, the emphasis
is to develop a set of sustainability principals used to reach maximum
efficiency while maintaining highest degree of compatibility
with Earth biology.
Technology Used
- Low cost/low power
microcontrollers
- Property wide Wifi sensor data network
- Analog to digital converters for
temp/humidity
- Point of Use high efficiency power converters
- Gravity
flow and auto siphon irrigation systems
- Solar powered monitoring and control
systems
- Soil sample logs and compost based PH/mineral control
-
Natural airflow assisted convection based heating/cooling
History
Environmental control systems concept started in the mid 70's.
Initial goals were to provide computer based central control for lighting and mechanical
appliances. Systems quickly expanded into providing security processes,
window/blind controls, lawn/plant watering, multi-location lighting/music
control, motorized locks and doors, water/smoke detection and speech
recognition.
Technology Needs Today
Changes in global weather patterns have resulted in a need for updated crop
scheduling charts and improvements to farming efficiencies. Automation
technologies learned over the past 4 decades are being re-purposed at Granby
Ridge Farm in order to develop new farming and resource management
strategies.
Experiments, resources, materials and project management is provided by
Mike Hogan and openly collaborated with interested parties under the
open source framework.
Donations are not expected and always appreciated.
Future of small scale automation
With the advent of low cost microcontrollers and consumer available control
systems, automation is becoming available to consumers and small producers.
Greenhouse management
In order to meet local commercial food market demands, small to
medium size greenhouses can benefit from efficiencies. Granby Ridge Farms
uses
greenhouse automation systems to manage irrigation, feeding, lighting, air
exchange and temperature/humidly of greenhouse environments.
Remote control of multi-zone
environments ensure correct conditions with added benefit of conserving power.
Lab process management
Earth sciences is a growing area
for small business and small producers. This increases interest in equipment
and software required for evaluating product load out states including
moisture content, chemical makeup, process introduced impurities and overall
quality. Small batch producers can benefit from lab automation systems to
ensure product quality and regulatory parameters are met. Resulting data can
be used for quality control, inventory control, lab safety and waste
management.
Acreage management
Several
challenges need to be addressed when maintaining acreages, farms or
business lots. These include: data access in large areas/multi
buildings, high density control needs, remote areas and minimal power feeds.
Granby Ridge Farms uses an automation backbone system to address these challenges
with monitoring and control of: power distribution, power fail over,
water monitoring, water distribution, solar power control systems,
greenhouse management systems, site security and monitoring, distributed
wireless networking, data logging and backup systems.
Present Day
Granby Ridge Farm is committed to
evaluating emergent trends with advances in low power, low impact
technologies for management of its farm activities. The purpose of
this site is to showcase Granby Ridge's experience with attempts to run its
farming operations in a safe, efficient and bio compatible method.
Website home page historical screenshots
Our automation development work has evolved for over 30
years. Here are some early website screenshots.
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