A farmer’s intro to GOAT

🐐What is GOAT?

GOAT — Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology — is a grassroots, volunteer-led community of folks who are trying to make better tools and services with (and for) farmers.

What does it mean to create “better” tools?

  • To support the right to repair your own tools, and to customize tools to fit your needs.
  • To consider small farm and niche market contexts that are often overlooked in the mainstream agritech industry.
  • To maintain an ethical focus, meaning better privacy, access and ownership of your own data.
  • To encourage collaboration and peer learning.

Under many open source licenses, you can freely use, and tweak, and reshare tools in our community. Some open source tools in our community are an alternative to proprietary and allow you to see what is “under the hood.” Often with these tools, you have the option to share your data the way you want, with who you want. Tool builders in our community also prioritize farmer-owned and co-designed tools and experiences.

From soil sensors to platforms that enable you to sell your products, GOAT tools are grass roots and community focused!

❓ How Do We GOAT?

We come together in-person biennially, virtually quarterly, and asynchronously on our forum to pursue shared interests. Together, we’re working to:
Connect our tools together so they are easier to find and easier to use.
Collaborate on infrastructure to make building and using tools faster, cheaper and easier.
Facilitate cooperative & collective action so you can take control of your technological future
Get tools into the hands of farmers by exhibiting at farmer-facing events

🛠️How Can I Get Involved?

Anyone aligned with the vision can plug in. We are a volunteer run organization! GOAT needs farmers to:
Learn about the tools we’re building
Influence the design of technology so they align with farmer priorities
Participate in community leadership to ensure it aligns with farmer values

You may notice that our forum and communication channels look a little different. We don’t use Slack or Whats App, but rather prefer Element or Signal. This is because we prioritize open source software that aligns with our goals of privacy and transparency. We know that it is a little extra work to download a new app, just like it’s a little extra work for your customers to shop locally. Once you jump in, these tools are easy to use, so don’t be scared to join us!

Common entry points include:

  • Join the GOAT Forum at forum.goatech.org.
    • Introduce yourself, share your research interests and institutional context, and engage with active threads.
  • Attend monthly community calls:
  • Join the mailing list at goatech.org to stay current on community priorities and conversations.
  • Attending the Biennial GOAT Gathering in December 2026
    • The GOAT conference is the main event—a 70–100 person convening of thought leaders, makers, and practitioners. It sparks new collaborations, shared visioning, and long-term projects.
    • Opportunities include: presenting, facilitating a session, joining hackathons or design sprints, collaborating on shared documents and artifacts, and participatory decision-making.
  • Visit us at farmer-facing events where we bring the traveling GOAT Booth.

🧑‍🌾 Who Can I Expect to Meet?

Great question! Here are some samplings from the movers and shakers in our introduce yourself thread:

An MIT instructor who left a bicycle startup to teach smallholder agriculture and now mentors grain mill and oil press projects in India

A former organic farmer turned farm-worker advocate who’s surveying the ag-tech industry while learning Python and worrying about robot safety on farms

A soil scientist who thinks about agriculture through the lens of soil food webs and loves connecting people into self-organizing systems

A statistician in Buenos Aires building models to predict soil carbon content across Africa and Central America

A recently retired agricultural librarian who spent 25 years at Cornell and now tends a hilltop homestead while weaving together solidarity food networks

An open source enthusiast on a Washington island who maintains a community seed bank and contributes to farm record-keeping software

A sensor developer in New Mexico helping small farms build healthy soil with limited water in the desert

A developer from Lisbon working on wholesale procurement tools to connect local food producers to buyers