Marcin Jakubowski has built tractors, a brick press, and other machines from scratch. Illustration by Martin Ansin

Marcin Jakubowski, the owner of a small farm in northwestern Missouri, is an agrarian romantic for high-tech times. A forty-one-year-old Polish-American, he has spent the past five years building industrial machines from scratch, in a demonstration of radical self-sufficiency that he intends as a model for human society everywhere. He believes that freedom and prosperity lie within the reach of anyone willing to return to the land and make the tools necessary to erect civilization on top of it. His project, the Global Village Construction Set, has attracted a following, but among the obstacles he has faced is a dearth of skilled acolytes: the people who show up at his farm typically display more enthusiasm for his ideas than expertise with a lathe or a band saw.

Until quite recently, living at the farm, thirty weed-choked acres off a gravel road, has required forgoing amenities like bathrooms and kitchens and running water, and maintaining a stoic disregard for the weather, which can be brutally cold or brutally hot. The property, called Factor e Farm—a geek’s pun, e being the mathematical constant—has only intermittently produced food, and, apart from a small grocery in nearby Maysville (pop. 1,000), the closest supermarket is fifteen miles away. Such conditions are a matter of indifference for Jakubowski: he can subsist with equal pleasure on mugs of Serious Mass, a weight-gain supplement, or on the occasional rabbit.

He holds a Ph.D. in fusion physics, and has the kind of obsessive temperament often associated with scientists. His habitual attire is a pair of khakis and a blue button-down, which suits him just as well for digging up a buried sewage line on the farm as for giving a presentation in Washington, D.C. Tucked under one arm or in his backpack is, invariably, a ream of white paper bound with corrugated cardboard and a couple of industrial staples: his journal. Jakubowski has kept a diary since he was ten, and in thirty years has scarcely missed a day. He is currently on Volume 21; these days, the pages are filled not with accounts of his dreams but with mechanical drawings and pasted-in business cards. Each morning, he completes two hours of yoga and meditation, even if he must get up at 4 A.M. “He likes things to be scheduled,” his fiancée, Catarina Mota, a forty-year-old scholar of open-source technology, says. “I’ll say, ‘I want to go buy some bread.’ He’ll say, ‘What time?’ ”

Like Spock, from “Star Trek,” Jakubowski has deliberate diction, closely shorn dark hair, and hooded eyes. He also has a Vulcan’s unwavering high-mindedness. His paternal grandfather fought in the Polish underground during the Second World War, helping to derail Nazi trains. A grandmother spent time in a concentration camp. Hearing their stories, Jakubowski concluded that the brutality of war was often a result of privation—an inability to secure the means of survival. His family left Poland when he was ten, in order to escape martial law, and moved to Paterson, New Jersey. The contrast between the abundance in American supermarkets and the empty shelves back home shocked him. “I never forgot about material scarcity,” he told me.

In 2003, the year that he received his doctorate, Jakubowski started a Web site, Open Source Ecology, or O.S.E., with the aim of collecting the best techniques for creating sustainable communities. Three years later, he and a girlfriend, Brittany Gill, bought the Missouri farm, for sixty thousand dollars. For two years, they lived on the property in a hut that they constructed out of two thousand yellow polypropylene bags, each stuffed with forty pounds of dirt. To stack the bags, they bought a used Massey Ferguson tractor with a front loader, for six thousand dollars. They built a greenhouse, planted hydroponic lettuce, and brought it to a farmers’ market in Kansas City, where it sold out in an hour. But a second crop was destroyed by thrips, and then the tractor developed a leaky transmission. Jakubowski took it to a repair shop, which charged him two thousand dollars.

Two days later, the tractor broke down again, and Jakubowski, out of cash, decided to build a new one himself. He did research online and concluded that a square steel frame with a hydraulic system—essentially, a box on wheels—would work. He started a blog to document his progress, and people began suggesting design improvements and giving money to the project. It took him two months and seven thousand dollars, most of it donated, to build the tractor. (A roughly equivalent John Deere tractor costs about forty-five thousand.) Jakubowski was delighted: it seemed possible not just to grow your own food or to build your own house but to make all the stuff in your life, including the tools that allow you to make everything else.

In 2009, Jakubowski posted on the O.S.E. blog a list of fifty machines that, in his view, could cheaply provide everything that a small community needed to sustain a comfortable existence. The list became the Global Village Construction Set. It includes mainstays of contemporary life (tractor, bakery oven, wind turbine) and also exotic, and relatively untested, equipment: an aluminum extractor, developed for lunar missions, that wrests the metal from clay; a bioplastic extruder, which converts plant-based plastic into such domestic necessities as window frames and adhesive tape. So far, Jakubowski has built sixteen of the machines—most of them prototypes—and he has also sold a few, at a small profit.

The number fifty is somewhat arbitrary, he concedes, but the set is intended to be “generative.” It should enable you to produce any other tools you might want. Crucially, the set is “open source.” Blueprints and instructions for each device are posted on Jakubowski’s Web site, for anyone to download and modify. At a TED talk that he gave in 2011, he declared, “Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit.”

The number of farmers driving O.S.E. tractors remains tiny: a Guatemalan team built one last year, as did a pair of Pasadena high-school seniors, who donated theirs to a farming collective in South Central Los Angeles. The shining future that Jakubowski envisages is sometimes shrouded in a hazy sci-fi logic. ****“Governments as we know them become obsolete,” he writes on the O.S.E. Web site. “We foresee an equal playing field of competent, well-organized, small-scale, decentralized republics after the borders of empires dissolve.”

Yet the boldness of his dream resonates widely. In 2012, Time called the Global Village Construction Set one of the year’s best inventions, and Jakubowski’s TED talk has been viewed more than 1.2 million times. The Shuttleworth Foundation, a South African organization that supports open-source innovators, has given him seven hundred thousand dollars. (He figures that it will cost between two million and three million to build all fifty machines.) And, nearly every day, he receives e-mails from strangers who want to help him remake civilization, without the competition, bloodshed, or environmental depredation.

On July 13th, a muggy Saturday afternoon, Jakubowski was in the machine shop at Factor e Farm, inspecting the handiwork of an improvised team: three former military officers, whom he had recently hired; four Dedicated Project Visitors (D.P.V.s), as interns are called; and four urban farmers from New Orleans’s impoverished Lower Ninth Ward. For nearly nine hours, the group had struggled to assemble a two-and-a-half-ton tractor, Erector-set style, from piles of square steel tubes punched on all sides with holes, using dozens of ten-inch bolts. ****The tractor team ****wore safety goggles, orange earplugs, and steel-toed boots. Working in pairs, they frequently paused to consult a few pages of color-coded instructions that the D.P.V.s had drawn up—a kind of homemade IKEA manual.

The machine shop is an airy hangar built of bricks made from the farm’s dirt, using a compressed-earth brick press of Jakubowski’s design: it ingests dirt and spits out blocks, as many as six hundred an hour. He has stocked the machine shop with a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of commercial industrial equipment, a reluctant concession to the mainstream economy. “If I don’t use what the system has right now, that will put a lot of handicaps on me,” he told me. “I use it, but with the pride to say, ‘As a result of my work, this will go out of business.’ ”