240: Eve Sibley on Recording the Farm's Activities

240: Eve Sibley on Recording the Farm’s Activities.

Creating a history of the garden or farm to document what works best.

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Eve is a creative who studied painting in school, but it was her passion for activism which led her into gardening and farming. In 2006, when she turned 30, she left New York City and moved to a farm to clarify where she wanted to focus her activism energy. She became interested in gardening as a solution to many of the world’s ails and immediately learned square foot gardening.

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Eve has spent years setting up innovative gardens, mostly vertical, for different organizations in her travels through the USA, Costa Rica, and India. She came to believe internet technology could be utilized to help more people with their growing projects, and during her travels used her computer skills on attempts to find ways to connect and help gardeners around the world. Through her gardening work, and by volunteering on various farms, Eve recently found a need for improved garden record-keeping and she set out to build an app for that. The FarmFollow app is available in app stores and this is the first real season it is in use.

In This Podcast:

We meet Eve Sibley who melded her determination to make a difference with a love of gardening to make an app that helps gardeners and farmers keep better records of their growing efforts. Eve explains how she got the idea to make an app for growers, and how to make use of the free online tool to keep track of the daily tasks that can make a difference in each year’s crop results.

Listen in and learn about:

Getting involved in activism in her 20’s and her realization that growing food became her passion for the planet
Moving to an old family organic farm and teaching herself square foot gardening
Choosing the next place to go in a unique way
Creating the World Food Garden website and her struggles
Creating vertical gardens in woofing type of agreements
Her wall garden for CouchSurfing.com
Working for the yoga center in Costa Rica- Anamaya,
Working at the Arts Tech place in Bangalore called Jaaga
The popularity of apps and deciding to move on from her website
Getting a chance to see how record keeping was done at one location and creating an app
Why garden planning and record keeping is so important
Compiling a history of your personal garden or farm
How to set up your information in the app
Dedicating herself to make the app work
How the app has some stuff private, and some stuff public to help share information
Tackling the dirty phone concern
The response from the public for the first season
Where to find the app
The capacity capabilities of the app
Expectations for how the app might evolve over time
Making the app free and how it can pay for itself

As well as:

Her failure – The World Food Garden website and how she spent way too much money
Her success – Co-founding a neighborhood organization to fight a re-zoning effort
Her drive – Activism, and making the world better
Her advice – Quiet the mind and listen to the heart