Lowering production costs and designing tools built for agroecological farming — putting technical capacity directly in the hands of campesin@ communities.
Industrial agriculture is engineered for industrial scale. The tools, inputs, and technologies available on the market are designed for monoculture operations — expensive, ecologically destructive, and inaccessible to small diversified farmers.
Engineering Brigades exist to invert this logic. We organize students, engineers, and technical workers to develop and adapt tools that serve agroecological production — not corporate agriculture. By lowering production costs and increasing technical self-sufficiency, we make it possible for campesin@ farmers to stay viable without compromising their practices.
Brigades operate as volunteer teams embedded with partner farmer communities, learning from campesinos what is actually needed and building accordingly.
Designing and building hand tools, small machinery, and equipment adapted to small-scale, diversified agroecological production.
Identifying where production costs can be reduced through collective procurement, repair, and tool-sharing programs.
Supporting low-cost water harvesting, irrigation, and soil health monitoring systems suited to small farms.
Documenting and sharing technical solutions across farmer networks so innovations can spread without corporate intermediaries.
Engineering Brigades are currently active across two regions, each embedded with partner communities doing live agroecological work.
Led by Tech for Liberation — a student engineering group at Stanford University — this project converts a trailer into a mobile, solar-powered cold storage unit for the Coalición de Pequeños Agricultores. For small campesin@ producers, cooler rental fees represent a recurring cost that cuts directly into already thin margins — fees paid not to grow food, but simply to keep it from spoiling before it can be sold. This unit eliminates that dependency entirely, giving farmers collectively owned cold storage they control, powered by the sun.
The project brings together students with skills in electrical systems, solar design, and fabrication to solve a problem defined by the farmers themselves — a direct expression of the brigade model in action.
A collaboration between 5C Critical Mass — a student organization at the Claremont Consortium Colleges — and the Saticoy Food Hub, this project refurbishes a Prohibition-era grain mill for a local community grain project. Work includes converting a belt-driven system to an electric motor, tightening the mill stones for correct grinding action, and reshaping the millstones for proper processing — hands-on mechanical and electrical problem solving with direct impact from farmers to eaters.
Saticoy Food Hub serves as both the anchor organization for the Los Angeles Territorial Markets and the community partner grounding this brigade's technical work. The mill restoration is part of a broader effort to build shared production infrastructure that belongs to the community — processing capacity that makes small-scale agroecological food systems economically viable.
We welcome engineers, designers, fabricators, students, and farmers. Tell us your skills and region and we'll connect you with an active brigade.