The cheaper and more distributed the means of production, the more particular communities of producers will also become design communities developing tools suited to their own needs.

One promising example of this is the Slow Tools project, created under the auspices of the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture.

“Nearly all of the tractors and their implements used by small farmers disappeared during the rise of the current global industrial farming system, beginning in the 1960s,” says Barry Griffin, a design engineer. Today, the market for small-scale farm equipment and tools simply doesn’t exist—and that puts small farmers at a disadvantage.

The purpose of the project, in whose engineering team Griffin is a central figure, is

re-imagining and re-inventing tools to bring appropriately scaled, lightweight, affordable and open-source tools to the swelling ranks of young farmers….

The Slow Tools project is bringing together a small group of engineers and leading farmers to design, build and make available through open-source systems a host of new tools.

As recounted by Cara Parks at The Magazine (“Hoe Down,” August 1), the main instigator of the project was Eliot Coleman. Coleman, inventor of the collinear hoe and author of the classic The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener, envisioned a project that would intensify this invention process.

Recently, he has agitated for more farmers to work collectively to, as it were, build a better hoe. “I’ve always noticed that when you get a bunch of small farmers together and they start kicking an idea around, you can make unbelievable progress,” Coleman says. “That’s why it was a good idea to get a lot of the tool geeks together. The farm-tool geeks.”

Projects include a small, durable solar-powered tractor, with a modular “plug and play” design for user-friendliness and ease of repair by young farmers who may not have much background working with machinery.