Farm Hack path toward digital sovereignty: a self-governed hardware

Digital Sovereignty Praxis course - Session 5 (April 15th, 2026)

Farm Hack path toward digital sovereignty: a self-governed hardware ! Developed and shared by Dorn Cox (Farm Hack / OpenTeam).

In this video, Dorn Cox explains the progressive path to make informed decision-making regarding the use of digital opportunities. He ended up with the idea of a box that can deliver multiple services, while being 100% self controlled and managed and able to communicate with other sister-boxes.

The journey includes the following steps:

1-    Identification of the task where digital tools could be of great support

Market-related activities, related to our Points of Sales, as inventory management, multi vendors management, wholesale account, and record keeping.

2-    Assess the existing open source and proprietary solutions against key criteria

Apply the Ethical Tech Assessment to existing softwares, with a strong consideration on one of our priority : data security.

3-    Building an appropriate digital system

Farm Hack ended up combining hardware / software open-source solutions in one system : One box hosting many apps in.

·      Hardware : Raspberry Pi (1Tera byte can possibly host lots of data USDA soils database, FAO database, etc…)

·      Softwares : Independant applications (not plugged into a wider external corporate application), Relationship to customers and vendors are not relying on external platforms, Designed for offline use and can be web connected. FarmOS and LiteFarm integration, as all farm data is host in one single(self-hosted) database. Identidy preservation.

·      Free and open-source.

·      Sovereign networks possible, as these boxes can connect and speak to eachother.

·      No internet requirement.

·      Can be plugged on 50w solar pannel + 12v battery.

·      Off line voice and text recognition possible, enabling locally hosted kind of articifical intelligence (or rather « search engine »).

·      Community Supported Agriculture management and distribution or Field mapping is also possible