Open Agriculture Technology is a collective of growers, farmers, technologists, educators, consultants, manufacturers, distributors and researchers. All with the common objective to support and improve the global food system. Everybody everywhere eats. We don't compete. We create. We share.
Practical technology for specialty-crop growers. Understand your growing conditions, catch problems earlier, and choose tools that fit the operation you actually run. Free guides, calculators, and open hardware for greenhouses, high tunnels, nurseries, market gardens, and indoor farms. Everything here is free to read and use. Nothing here is for sale.
What are you trying to improve?
Start from the problem, not the product. Each of these goes to a specific page that answers one question.
Where you grow.
Every grower controls some dials and leaves the rest to the weather. The site is organized so you can start from your end of that spectrum.
Appropriate technology.
Appropriate technology is technology matched to the job: the need, the scale, the budget, and the skills on hand. It comes in every size. It might be a twenty-five-dollar sensor that tells you a greenhouse is getting cold, an alert instead of a trip out of bed to check. It might be a full commercial system that runs that greenhouse on its own. Sometimes it is a handheld meter and a better routine. Reading a plant's needs is the skill of an experienced grower; technology doesn't replace that skill, it extends it, covering the work that only requires watching: an eye on things while you're away, on duty while you sleep, a heads-up when something moves out of range. When it fits, it does more with fewer hands. When it doesn't, it costs more than it saves. The right size is the one that fits.
Collect · Have · Use.
Everything on this site hangs on one model with three moves. Sense it, keep it, use it. Collect: measure what is really happening, with a sensor, a meter, or your own two eyes and a clipboard. Have: the reading itself, with its when and its where, stored in a form you can export and take with you. Sensors die, apps change, companies fold; the record you kept survives all of it and gets more valuable every season. Use: the payoff. An alert at 2 a.m., a chart that puts last January next to this one, and every useful answer AI will ever give you about your grow, because it can't say a thing about a crop you never measured.
The two ends don't need to know about each other. A sensor doesn't care what reads its data, and software doesn't care which sensor wrote it. The data in the middle is the contract, and if you get that part right, every tool on this site (and plenty that haven't been invented yet) can plug into it. The model, explained.
The collective.
We're growers, researchers, educators, and the trade, each carrying knowledge the others don't have time to gather, starting with the growers for whom understanding is the only edge they can afford. A grower who has fixed a nutrient lockout, a researcher who measured it, and a supplier who has seen it across fifty operations each know a piece of the same problem; together they know the whole of it. That's the point of sharing.
Everything here is free to read, and there is no paywall. A few tools ask for a login, the ones that save your own work. If you have something to add (a correction, a working example, knowledge worth sharing), the Collective page explains how.
The six doors.
The top of every page carries the same six doors. Growing holds the agriculture: the ten inputs a plant answers to, every method from soil to sealed room, and the crops themselves. Technology holds the technology, led by the projects you can flash from your browser tonight.
A few rooms sit one door in: Hort Assistant (monitoring and control built on Home Assistant), monitoring and control under Technology, post-harvest and the specialty crafts under Growing, hardware, the glossary, and funding & programs under Resources.