Hi Folks,
For quite a while I have been waiting for a new computerized farm planning system that I heard was being developed to become available for use. I had heard about it on a market farming listserve I subscribe to. Yesterday I learned that it is now "live" as a beta testing environment and FREE for the first three months' trial period if you sign up now (I believe they said it would only be $4.00/mo. after the trial period ends).
I've played with it a little and it is quite good. I say this having also used another farm planning tool that was very clunky. This new one has a lot of neat features. It's primarily geared towards small-scale market farmers, but I see some aspects that might be very useful to permaculturists. The developers WANT feedback from early adopters, so perhaps, if
enough permaculturists sign up to try it out and gently prod them to add features that would be of use to permaculturists for creating, implementing and tracking
permaculture designs, they might very well be receptive.
It's kinda fun (although a bit slow over my sluggish satellite Internet connection) and is set up fairly intuitivly. This is a good time of year to play with such toys and I encourage you to go to their website, explore what they are offering and sign up for a free account, if you want to, to start using the tool for your project-- or try it out anyway. They have some on-line documentation and help files. I am willing also to try and help if folks post questions (or comments on how it could be improved for
permaculture) on the new community forum on the Inland Northwest
Permaculture Guild website:
http://www.inlandnorthwestpermaculture.com/forum
The website for the new farm planning system is:
http://www.agsquared.com
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