Skip to content

Domain content overview (Smart Farm Wiki)

This page is the steering document for the vault’s domain (not CI or MkDocs mechanics—see Repository analysis). It keeps the strand map, states the target future, judges maturity, names gaps, separates supportable vs unsupported decisions, and ends with a short prioritized backlog. Agents and humans should read it before large ingests or architecture work.

New to the wiki? Start here · How to read this wiki · Glossary (hub).

Epistemic stance: Claims about your operation require your data; the wiki holds placeholders, source-notes, and synthesis. This overview does not replace professionals (legal, tax, electrical, vet).

Canonical ownership & anti-sprawl: Which cluster owns durable meaning (business plan, two-site ops, telemetry/SoR, validation, economics) and how entities and hubs should route readers—see Structural audit — page ownership, entity gaps, and hub routing. Structural tech debt & ops maturity policy (sprawl diagnosis, page_subtype, operational_maturity): Structural debt audit — wiki IA and operational maturity. Themed navigation without mirroring the full analysis list: Wiki navigation and structural hubs (Five package hubs: platform, backup/DR, off-grid + field networking, local site intelligence, execution & pilots). Backup / DR doctrine (farmOS, Postgres, k3s, Longhorn, Rancher, secrets, edge): Backup and disaster recovery package — smart farm stack + Disaster recovery decision rules — farm edge stack. Operational standards (Pi, cluster bootstrap, scheduling/storage, secrets, observability, backup cadence, field naming, gateways, site boundaries): Operational standards — farm and homelab platform. Procedural guides (how-tos and runbooks in analyses/, page_subtype: operational_guide, maturity): Procedural guides package strategy — Smart Farm Wiki. SITE_FARM (Demory) field sensors (LoRaWAN / HaLow / mesh; Starlink = WAN only): Farm sensor architecture — Demory farm site, Sensor checklist matrix — Demory farm, source cluster Demory farm sensor layer — official and operator-grade. Prefer extending a canonical page over a parallel analysis; follow AGENTS.md (page ownership, canonicalization, entity-first).

Local site + county layer (two-site package): From the business plan into Anderson / Campbell context and Claxton / Demory anchors—Local site and county intelligence (topic). Durable entities (roles vs places vs counties): SITE_HOME / Claxton (place) / Anderson County (context); SITE_FARM / Demory (place) / Campbell County (context). Complements Strand B (regional business) and Strand A (land/water) without a parallel “strategy” essay.

Target future-state

The vault should become a decision-safe operational brain for a two-site pattern (homestead-scale + farm-parcel-scale, separated by meaningful drive time): land and biology, energy and water, digital telemetry and records, business and risk—with explicit identity (parcel/paddock/device), reference architecture for field tech, runbooks for failure, and economics that justify capital. See Strategic audit — decision-safe operations for a two-site smart farm and Information architecture — decision-safe operational brain (target design).

Concrete end-state signals

  • Foundation pages (spinal cord) are active and cross-linked: dual-site ops model, field telemetry reference architecture, farm spatial + asset registry standard, CAPEX/OPEX sequencing—see Foundation artifacts below.
  • Comparisons force tradeoffs (radios, records stack, equipment vs hire, gateway topology)—not vendor enthusiasm.
  • Runbooks assume architecture first (broker down, remote power loss, alert triage, manual irrigation/gates)—see Automation degraded modes and manual fallback SOP as parent SOP.

North star (three rings)

The corpus mixes small-scale agriculture and homestead practice with instrumentation, networks, and automation. Mental model:

  1. Land and living systems — soil, water, crops, livestock, ponds, regional gardening.
  2. Energy and infrastructure — off-grid solar, storage, pumps and hydrology, time as infrastructure.
  3. Digital layer — LPWAN/mesh, MQTT, MCUs, farmOS / records, homelab patterns, cybersecurity.

Not every page sits in all three rings; many source-notes are single-import anchors pending synthesis.

Strand map (A–G)

Strand A — Land, water, and biological production

Themes: Rotations, cover crops, compost, forage, precision soil sensing, livestock, ponds, irrigation, horses, woodland specialty botanicals (e.g. American ginseng ingests + start plan).

Hubs: Sustainable cropping, soil, and farm entry sources, Homestead composting and soil sources, Homestead and regional gardening sources, Backyard livestock and homestead animal sources, Ponds, water features, and homestead hydrology · Synthesis: American ginseng from seed — ASAP start plan (ASAP + TDEC gates) · companion site / planting / maintenance guides in analyses/ + PDF-heavy ginseng batch · Raising pigs — small-scale homestead guide (homestead blog/forum batch; confirm with extension).

Concepts: Precision agriculture, Composting.

Strand B — Regional business, diversification, shelter

Themes: TN-leaning business excerpts, agritourism, tiny housing / natural building where it intersects farm stays.

Hubs: Tennessee hobby farm and small-farm business sources, Agritourism, tiny housing, and natural building sources.

Strand C — Field connectivity (LPWAN, mesh, Wi‑Fi HaLow)

Themes: LoRa vs LoRaWAN vs Meshtastic; MQTT bridges; solar repeaters; cellular IoT.

Hubs: Smart agriculture, Meshtastic, and LoRaWAN, Field network IoT comparisons (HaLow, LoRa, NB-IoT), LoRa, MQTT, and gateway bridges.

Concepts: LoRa (radio), LoRaWAN, Meshtastic, Wi-Fi HaLow, DePIN.

Strand D — Edge devices and farm-adjacent compute

Themes: ESP32, ESPHome, farmOS, ag-lab / homelab, containers.

Hubs: ESP32, ESPHome, and smart-farming builds, Farm data, farmOS, and agriculture lab builds, Homelab, self-hosting, and edge narratives, Docker, Kubernetes, Compose, and Bake (edge and homelab). Pi / k3s / Longhorn platform doctrine: Platform doctrine package — homelab / farm edge; strategy: Platform strategy for farm and homestead services; provisioning runbook: How to provision k3s, Longhorn, and Rancher on a Raspberry Pi fleet. Backup / DR package: Backup and disaster recovery package — smart farm stack.

Concepts: ESP32, Data storage (farm and edge stacks).

Strand E — Power and site energy

Hub: Off-grid solar power and storage (special topic).

Strand F — Building automation and consumer IoT

Hubs: Smart home — Matter, Thread, and Home Assistant AI (special topic), Smart mirror and e-paper display builds.

Strand G — Time, position, resilient references

Hubs: Time synchronization — NTP and PTP sources, Position, navigation, and timing alternatives.

Concepts: NTP, PTP. Synthesis: Timing on the farm — synthesis.

Maturity matrix by strand

Strand What the wiki does well Maturity What is still thin
A Broad source capture; some synthesis (compost, ponds); forage PDFs ingested Medium Carrying capacity conclusions; sensor ↔ rotation loops per field
B TN / hobby-farm pointers; agritourism analyses Low–Medium Integrated economics and labor routing
C Strong literacy and MQTT/LoRa clusters Medium Chosen stack per site; comparison to decision-grade
D farmOS + lab + homelab threads Medium–Low System of record; farmOS model tied to map
E Solar / storage narratives Medium One diagram with field gateway power
F HA / Matter survey Medium–Low HA as farm alert consumer + on-call
G NTP/PTP primers Medium Subsystem clock requirements in architecture

Foundation artifacts (spinal cord)

These four analyses connect strands that the map above used to only gesture at:

Page Role
Dual-site operations model — non-agritourism farm business Production-led logistics vs agritourism bias; batching and equipment home.
Field telemetry reference architecture — homestead + 120-acre farm Broker, radios, uplink, HA/farmOS/TSDB placeholders and SPOFs.
Farm spatial model and asset registry standard IDs for land, assets, devices; map authority.
CAPEX, OPEX, and enterprise sequencing — two-site constraint Capital phasing under distance; ties enterprise to infrastructure.

Expanded gaps

Supported vs unsupported decisions (from this repository alone)

Generally supported (with sources + synthesis)

Decision type Why
Radio stack literacy (LoRa vs LoRaWAN vs mesh) Topic hubs + concepts + comparisons
farmOS data model (assets, logs) Documentation captures + Farm data…
Enterprise budget orientation (UT publications, scenarios) Source-notes + East Tennessee — profitable crops matrix
OT security framing (inventory, remote access mitigations) CISA ingests + cisa-primary-mitigations-ot-cyber-threats-excerpt
Degraded automation (manual safe states) Automation degraded modes and manual fallback SOP + runbooks below

Unsupported or high risk without external data / professionals

Decision type Why
Exact enterprise profitability Needs your yields, prices, costs
Insurance / entity / liability Tennessee farm business compliance package + UT W1266 insurance PDF (see package) — still agent/attorney gates for limits
Whether to deploy LoRaWAN vs Meshtastic on your terrain Site survey + comparison page is input, not answer
Legal market channels (meat, on-farm sales) Counsel + current TN rules
“Hands-off” remote farm via automation alone Conflicts with welfare and coverage reality

Runbooks (after architecture)

Written to depend on foundation pages and reference architecture, not to replace them:

Parent: Automation degraded modes and manual fallback SOP.

Comparisons (tradeoffs)

Prioritized backlog (short)

  1. Telemetry system of record — extend Telemetry system of record — boundaries and authority with conflict playbooks (farmOS vs HA vs TSDB) as operators deploy; backlog P0 #6 tracked in Implementation backlog.
  2. Parcel/paddock naming + asset registry minimum fields as first-class templates (if not yet split from spatial standard).
  3. Two-site operations topic hub — topics/two-site-smart-farm-operations is live; ongoing: keep tables current when adding sibling pages.
  4. Farm cybersecurity and remote access topic hub (CISA ingests → policy).
  5. Homestead civil systems topic (command post during crises).
  6. Stocking and forage — methods (extension synthesis).
  7. Insurance checklist (two parcels).
  8. Resilience graph analysis (roads × water × power × comms).
  9. Instrumentation priority matrix — Instrumentation priority matrix — two-site smart farm exists; fill with site evidence over time.
  10. Named entities — farmOS, Home Assistant; sites & systems — Five-acre home base (SITE_HOME), 120-acre production farm (SITE_FARM), Farm parcels and land units, Farm water infrastructure system, Farm on-site power system, Field telemetry network — two-site; operating-object roles (gateways, WAN, node classes, DR tiers, labor/market buckets) — Entity layer — operating objects gap audit + index.md; equipment instances when stable names exist.

Detailed tracking: Implementation backlog — strategic audit (P0–P3).

Meta and navigation

Steering document: update when foundation pages, comparisons, or runbooks materially change.