In the early spring of 2024, I was approached about consulting for a farmer-led software project called Farm Flow. At first, I viewed the project as a software generalist and independent contractor would. I consciously guarded myself against becoming the proverbial "hammer that sees every problem as a nail," each in desperate need of driving – that is, I did not want to force it into the Runrig framework of software design. I said as much to the software's creator, Matthew Fitzgerald of Fitzgerald Organics, on multiple occasions throughout the course of our early evaluation. It was no accident, however, that the project's underlying requirements and ultimate goals brought it into close alignment with my own stated objectives for Runrig. I was introduced to Matthew through Samuel Oslund of the 11th Hour Project, and no doubt Sam discerned the affinity between our two projects far more readily than I had.^[1]

The Original Farm Flow Board

Farm Flow's first implementation was in physical form, a point I took to be one of the strongest possible indicators for the effectiveness of any software project, a credit to the soundness of its design. It stood as a roughly 72" by 48" whiteboard in Matthew's high-lofted equipment shed, prepared with a grid of about 80 columns by 20 rows, give or take, meticulously etched out in black permanent marker. The grid represented the farm's entire growing season of planned field actions, with a column for every calendar day and a row for every field or planting location. The dates and location names were written in magic marker along the top and left-hand edges, respectively, so that the grid contents could be erased and repurposed with each new season. Multi-colored magnetic discs populated the grid cells at various intervals, demonstrating some rather striking patterns, though their precise meaning was not immediately clear to the untrained eye. The right-hand fringe of these discs were bounded by raised magnetic pushpins (mimicking pushpin thumb-tacks in size and shape), which were similarly colored but translucent and smaller in radius, so they stood out less prominently than the discs. The pins represented actions that were still only planned, while the discs represented those already completed. On closer inspection, some discs were even stacked upon others within a single grid cell; some actions, though not all, could be performed in the same day in the same location, conditions permitting. Running intermittently in vertical lines between the discs, you could make out faint numbers inscribed by a blue magic marker within each of the individual cells. They indicated rainfall amounts in decimal inches and rarely coincided with any placed discs, since the actions they would have represented were prohibited by the rain (sometimes for several days following, too). The rainfall quantities varied in magnitude as they ran up and down the column, though only gradually, since the rows representing geographic locations on the farm were grouped by proximity. In the wide open space below the grid was a hand-written legend indicating the name of the specific field action each color represented, alongside a collection of unused discs and pins loosely clustered by color.

The key to the whole enterprise was that there was nothing at all arbitrary in the arrangement of these field actions. Their precise timing and sequence were determined by a set of standard operating procedures, or SOPs, which were the product of ongoing development by this small team of farmers. The SOPs lived in written form within folders filed into separate trays that hung from the back of the whiteboard itself. The trays also held carbon-copy ticket books, which would be filled out with specific quantities and target values to inform the execution of a given operation at a particular time and place. Space was left on each ticket for the entry of actual values achieved or observed, so that upon completion the ticket could be stored in the appropriate folder for future reference.

DRAFT NOTICE

This documents is still in draft; please check back soon to read more!

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1. The first time I ever tried to fully explain Runrig to anyone else was on a short hike with Samuel on the last day of GOAT 2022. The last in a series of momentous conversations, it came at the precise moment when Runrig started taking definite shape in my own mind, and I attribute much of Runrig's essential characteristics to Sam's astute guidance and constructive feedback. ↩︎