Compost Heat and CO2 Capture and Use – Composting uses micro-organisms to break-down organic materials rendering a valuable soil amendment. Two outputs from composting are heat and CO2, resources which are normally lost in the composting process and emitted into the atmosphere. Students working on this project should expect to work collaboratively with the farm and a small team of civil engineering students in the development and design for the heat transfer and CO2 recovery systems. 

Aquaponics Fish Waste Dewatering System – With many aquaculture systems, fish waste can be difficult to manage.  Bigelow Brook Farm currently takes their fish waste, decants some of the nutrient water from it, and dumps the sludge in our fields since it is a low quantity.  Unfortunately, many places are not able to dispose of their waste in this method.  The few commercial ways to dewater sludge are primarily designed for larger scale systems. The goal of this project is to develop a small dewatering system that makes it possible to use or sell the solid waste, produced by fish in the aquaponics system, as a soil supplement. 

Process to Create Improved Durability Beehive Frame – The Union Bee Company located in Union CT.  They maintain about 100 honeybee colonies, sell honey locally, and offer propolis encouraging hives (a natural resinous mixture produced by honeybees from substances collected from parts of plants, buds, and exudates) which studies suggest improves honeybee colony health. The beehive frames are made of soft pine wood with interlocking joints and are “self-spacing” via the Hoffman end bars. The joints are prone to splitting and breaking during handling. The objective of this project is to identify, develop and demonstrate a process to efficiently create a new joint design. 

Sustainable Greenhouse Seedling Warming System – Northwest Corner Farm is located in Winchester, CT. We produce ~60 varieties of ~30 vegetables and ~12 varieties of herbs, as well as maple syrup, honey, and cultivated mushrooms. Because we are building out the farm infrastructure from scratch, we intend to build a fully renewable-energy farm infrastructure by electrifying all operations of the farm and powering them from on-farm solar as soon as feasible. The objective of this project is to design and develop an efficient, seedling heating system run entirely on electricity. As this is a design that will potentially be shared with other farms, the design should optimize the configuration with regard to ease of construction and availability of materials, ability to monitor function remoted, and portability.   

Design of a Solar-powered Ventilation System for High Tunnels – High Tunnels are widely used in agriculture to extend the growing season and protect crops from adverse weather conditions. However, during the hot days of summer, maintaining optimal temperatures and humidity levels inside these tunnels becomes a significant challenge. The goal of this project is to design a ventilation system that can effectively extract hot air from one end of the High Tunnel to the other, ensuring a stable internal environment conducive to plant growth. The system will use solar panels and will operate automatically based on adjustable temperature and humidity conditions. 

Creating an App for the Ask Aunt Nellie Project, a Crowd-Sourced Connecticut Farm Management Knowledge Base – In the original iteration of this project, Ask Aunt Nellie (AAN) was to be a collection of spreadsheets detailing the knowledge needed to manage small-scale diversified farms. Resources will include a crowd-sourced farm inventory, agricultural suppliers, and farm-friendly professionals. The goal is to create a user-friendly app that serves as an interface for a database of all the stuff farmers need to run their businesses. The three core functions will be the abilities to search for, ask for, and contribute knowledge. There will also be the ability to “browse” categories and info within categories. Some examples of categories are tractor implements, irrigation supplies, and bulk materials. 

FarmOS Digital Grazing Plan – There is an open-source farm management software called farmOS (https://farmos.org/) written as a drupal distribution. It provides record management of all types to farmers. The code is open source and development is community driven. In the current version of the software, there is no grazing plan module. There was one for version 1 of farmOS (https://github.com/farmOS/farm_grazing), but it was a very early version that was not workable and is not currently compatible with v3.  This module would help organize grazing animals’ movement on the farm. The goal of this project is to develop a workable grazing plan module for farmers to use in the current version of FarmOS. 

Compost/Mulch Spreader – Sweet Acre Farm is a low/no-till farm and has been improving related growing practices over the last 6 years. There are a few bottlenecks to the bed preparation process in the no-till system, the most taxing & expensive of which is topping the new bed with finished compost and mulching the paths with wood chips. Currently, compost is brought to the area by truck and then human power moves wheelbarrows of the compost down the 100-ft bed, dumping and spreading the piles with a metal rake. Modifying a small manure spreader to shoot a fine quantity of compost or chip out the back and down at the ground would save an incredible amount of staff time and money. The objective of this project is to design and fabricate necessary modifications to a manure spreader using the Ford 1600 tractor PTO (power take off) to enable placement of compost and mulch in the beds.  

Design of an Adaptable Small Seed Thresher – The owner of the farm operates a small-scale seed company that aggregates the seed from 12 (more) urban and suburban farmers around the Northeast. All seeds must be cleaned before they can be tested and packed for commercial production. Currently there are two challenges. First, seed needs “debearding,” the removal of the papas (or wings) that are attached to the seed. Second, seed needs to be threshed, which is separating the seed from the sticks and stems on which it grows. This senior design project aims to address engineering and design challenges associated with creating an efficient, easy-to-clean, easy-to-operate, and portable seed thresher for different seed sizes, for a small farm. The design challenge involves creating a thresher that is portable and that is easy to set up and put away, following human factors principles to ensure user-friendliness. The mechanical components will be protected and will be placed for easy maintenance.