Hello and happy Easter to all,
This is also the start of a new fiscal year for sun aqua systems and I’m thinking that I will try a different method of communicating and documenting our research. The current greenhouse project was partly successful this winter, we did get tomatoes all through January and February, but the yield wasn’t high enough for commercial viability, and the modeling didn’t match the experiment well. So I think there is still hope for a good winter natural light greenhouse but it’s going to take a while. In the meantime, we’ve also branched out into making some fast-to-deploy portable electric fences and building a dairy robot. I’m hoping to produce the electric fences for sale soon, but I think the general takeaway here is that things always take far longer than expected, especially with our limited resources.
To keep myself motivated I’m going to try posting daily what I’ve been working on, and include the data in a sort of open science format. This is going to look ugly, I will warn you in advance. Probably the main reason open science never caught on is that it is an extreme exercise in humility. All of your mistakes are on the public record and there is no real time to smooth out the explanations and prettify the graphs etc as you work. The patent clock to file is also starting earlier if you care about that. On the other hand, I think it’s the best way to be motivated to do the best possible job, and also since I don’t often have the funds to submit journal articles, it’s a good way to keep all the work we’ve done available to the world at large. Who knows, something might happen and the company might fail before we’ve perfected a winter greenhouse, but I do want the record to be out there to help any future researchers.
The plan is to write a short post, based on my lab book notes each day, with no more than 15 min of editing time. Then if there are any requests for additional information, original data messy as that might be, I’ll also go back and post them here.
Sun Aquasystems 