Country: Greece
Wellbeing of Farmers: Physical Wellbeing, Mental Wellbeing, Social Wellbeing
Key Challenges: Lack of basic services, Low farm income (market vulnerability), Lack of attractiveness of certain farming profession, External factors (whether, climate change, etc.)
Key Target Groups: Young farmers, Female farmers, Older farmers
Farm Size: Small/Family, Medium
Find Out More
Key contact: Alexandros (Alekos) Pantazis
Email: Pantazis.al@gmail.com
Organization: Tzoumakers
Relevant Links:
Summary
Tzoumakers is an open lab for communities to cooperatively design and manufacture tools for small-scale agricultural production. They cooperatively design and manufacture tools for small-scale agricultural production.
Their vision is to create such villages where farmers may seize technology into their own hands. These sites may be supported by municipalities and / or by multi-stakeholder cooperatives
Objective
As part of a greater social innovation project Cosmolocalism the creation of this living lab in an isolated mountainous area in Greece creates the conditions for farmers themselves to take into their hands the way they are practicing agriculture and the tools they use, outside the mainstream market.
This is actually the objective “design globally, build locally”.
Activities
Since 2018 in the mountainous village of Kalentzi in Ioannina they have a co-working space in their space equipped with tools for cutting and processing iron and wood, microprocessors, 3D printers and scanners, CNC machines low-tech tools and crafts.
There they developed tools for small-scale farmers, stockbreeders and beekeepers, whose technology (i.e. designs and knowledge of construction) is then freely shared (open).
They also organize talks and meetings to empower farmers towards technological self efficiency
Main Outcome of the activity
Farmers take the creation of tools in their own hands: they share the knowledge and design globally via the internet and collaboratively adapt and manufacture tools locally. In this way they minimize the risks and the stress created by tools that do not match the local, small scale circumstances of small scale farming.
They also create tools that are fitted to their needs in terms of both community members and type of farm hence they work on the concepts of democratizing technology and technological sovereignty.
They have developed 13 farming tools. For these tools, the documentation is shared openly on their webpage (drawings, instructions, photos, software).
Main Practical Recommendations
Practitioners may use this social innovation as an example of what collaboration on a global level and collective manufacturing in a local level can do in addressing challenges faced while working on the farm due to difficult weather or geomorphological conditions, and volatile economic conditions.
The innovation of the open source equipment provides an excellent example of the power of the commons in addressing social and environmental challenges.
All farmers will have a practical benefit from using these locally created open source farming tools
Key Stakeholders Involved
- Farmers
- P2P Lab -an interdisciplinary research collective focused on the Commons
Most Innovative Aspects of the Solution
- Citizen’s knowledge, living lab, cooperative design, local manufacture.
- Sharing of solutions for practical problems faced on the farm.
- Grassroots technology in the digital era.
Relevant Documents:
The following list includes projects that either are explicitly taking place under the umbrella of DGML or are linked to it:
- Digital commons, local manufacturing, and sustainability (published)
- The emergence of urban makerspaces (published)
- Think global, print local (published)
- A new model of production for a new economy (published)
- Peer to peer: The commons manifesto (ongoing)
- Evaluating open hardware from a sustainability perspective (ongoing)
- Research on degrowth (published)
Coordinator: Vasilis Kostakis & Vasilis Niaros.