Why are we making kits if this is an opensource hardware project?

Building your own windowfarm is always an option and enabling anyone who has more time than money to do this is the whole point. That is the “charitable” cause we are working for here at Windowfarms headquarters.

However, we are also trying to get as many people as possible to have windowfarms so we can do collective research on how to best grow plants under the local conditions of our homes. This is our secondary research mission. NASA is researching how to grow plants in the space station and we are researching how to grow plants in our apartment windowfarms– both unlikely but potentially viable venues for veggie plants given a little help from us humans.

A lot of people have asked us, the core team, to just make kits. Not everyone is willing to be a hardware hacker and lots of people with valuable skills to add to the project (foodies, gardeners, teachers, parents) just say they are not handy enough to build their own. We want to get these people on board so the hackers can learn from the gardeners and we all build new skills!

Finally, this will be a source of income for the project. Believe it or not, it takes a lot of time and money to run the windowfarms project and frankly, I’m going broke. We used the funding we raised on Kickstarter earlier this year to set up a shop, improve the fundamental infrastructure of the website for higher traffic use, and to start testing components for kits.

I would like this to be a source of local green jobs for some of the dedicated volunteers whose time and brilliance have made this project possible. If we cannot pay some of them for their time, they need to move on to other work soon and we will lose their valuable accumulated knowledge. Instead, I hope we can bring them on in a more permanent capacity to have them help me train a new workforce of NYC local kids who will then be ready for the coming greencollar market in NY.

If you have some great business experience, legal acumen, good connections, and/or some time to volunteer to help make this mission happen, please send me a message.