Fellowship Focus

This project started 5 years ago with a dialogue between several territorial organizations to explore how open technologies, and the people working on them, could be part of and support the agroecological transition. This process of mutual translation and understanding led to the idea of integrating people and open tools to systematize, follow and share experiences in order to enable our collaborative learning and the public amplification of agroecology. Nano and colleagues call this emergent infrastructure Open Agroecology Lab. They view this as a bottom-up proposal for the digitalization of agroecological experiences to support and strengthen public valorization and acknowledgement of agroecology (i.e., through participatory guarantee systems) and to resist the current AgTech wave that will only intensify pressure on small farmers and increase their technological dependency to corporations. During this fellowship, Nano will dedicate time to exploring how climate change issues can be addressed by and inscribed into the Open Agroecology Lab infrastructure.

Bio

Nano Castro (he/they) is a digital artisan from Mendoza, Argentina working at the interface between open scientific/technological communities and local communities that need to build knowledge about their environments or productive processes. Nano is part of Cooperativa Ayllú, a coop that manages a small farm that produces food and beverages. He has facilitated several workshops about open source scientific tools around the world and is currently engaged in establishing an Open Agroecology Lab to support the agroecological transition in Latin America. He is an active member of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) and its regional chapter reGOSH.