Re-designing Farming
The regenerative agriculture revolution promises to dramatically change the way we grow our food. Its success—or failure—could have profound consequences for the future of life on earth.
It is now well established that our dominant agricultural practices are causing planetary-scale ecosystem disruption. Research led by scientists at the University of Queensland and published in the journal Nature found agriculture is a key driver of biodiversity loss and a greater threat to wildlife than climate change.
Jonathan Foley described agriculture as “the other inconvenient truth” in a series of articles and talks in 2009, warning that humanity faces “a global crisis in land use and agriculture that could undermine the health, security, and sustainability of our civilization.” In one bleak finding, a recent report by the Food and Land Use Coalition estimated the cost of the damage caused by agriculture is greater than the value of the food produced.
As environmental scholar Cameroin Muir writes below, “Design professionals are among those rising to the challenge of rethinking current agricultural systems and practices.”
Re-designing Farming
by Cameroin Muir (2021)
Design professionals are among those rising to the challenge of rethinking current agricultural systems and practices. Dramatic renders of vertical farming structures have captured public interest, rooftop horticultural gardens for new buildings have grown in popularity, and landscape architects have incorporated community agriculture into public places. One proposal for the rebuild of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral reimagined the roof as a glasshouse, capturing energy to power the building, and using aquaponics and permaculture to grow up to 21 tons of fruits and vegetables per year. Urban agriculture, if done with the right policies and support, could act as a buffer against disruption, reduce food deserts, develop community skills, and increase understanding about how food is produced. But while this is promising, experts still say urban agriculture can likely only supply food for a small proportion of a city’s population, serving as a supplement to broadscale agriculture. This makes the development of more sustainable and regenerative broadscale agriculture systems crucial in the fight against climate change.
As landscape architect Thomas Woltz asks in a widely viewed TED Talk, “how is it that the way we feed ourselves can end up killing us?” Woltz’s practice has been responsible for several high profile projects in North America and New Zealand that integrate agriculture with landscape architecture to address conservation and sustainability goals. Woltz describes himself as determined to apply the “skillset of landscape architecture to land in need” and the training and interdisciplinary interests of the discipline—in understanding intimate human and large scales, horticulture, landform, drainage, cultural interpretation, and change over time—appear well-suited to collaboration with broadscale agriculture. Yet, despite this, and the seeming success of Woltz’ projects, landscape architecture practice remains rare in agriculture. This is especially surprising in Australia, given its history of developing principles for design in farming, notably keyline planning and permaculture.
In 1954, Australian farmer and inventor PA Yeomans self-published The Keyline Plan, the first of four books explaining techniques and designs to conserve water and improve soil health. Through careful observation, Yeomans developed a holistic understanding of agricultural ecologies, including the importance of soil as a living, evolving system. He showed that farms needed to be planned on a scale that considered the whole of the landscape, taking account of “climate, landscape, water supply, farm roads, trees, permanent buildings, subdivision fences and soil.” He rejected the heavy engineering and high disturbance techniques imported from the US Soil Conservation Service, and instead designed contour plans that responded to natural water courses, slowed the movement of water, retained it in the soil, and spread it towards the ridges rather than to gullies. Tined cultivation, rotational grazing, and mulching fed soil microbes. The design, principles, and methods of Keyline increased biodiversity, resilience, and
Historian and professor of social ecology, Stuart Hill, believes Yeomans “developed the most innovative, and most sustainable, integrated landscape design and management system that has ever been developed and tested.” Although Keyline design has been taken up by farmers in many countries, it did not break through to the mainstream. Hill attributes this largely to the advent of “deceptively simple management tools” for agriculture that emerged at the same time, such as superphosphate.
Although Keyline’s holistic practices did not gain widespread popularity, as author and farmer Charles Massy writes, it did play a “major role in influencing one of the greatest Australian contributions to a sustainable farming movement: that of permaculture.” David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture, drew on Yeoman’s work when developing the concept in the 1970s. Permaculture is embraced by growers around the world and offers significant benefits for sustainability, but like keyline design, it has received little scientific attention and remains limited in its adoption relative to conventional high-input industrial agriculture.
Design opportunities didn’t stop at keyline and permaculture. These holistic alternative agricultural practices emerged at the same time as rising public ecological consciousness. Environmental historian Libby Robin explored how post-war ecological science shaped the values of those who fought to save western Victoria’s Little Desert bushland from new agricultural development. Community members, public servants, and conservation scientists used economic, aesthetic, recreational, and scientific grounds to question the proposal. The 1969 campaign was so successful it became a “cultural icon,” wrote Robin, signalling a transformation in Australian politics and society. News media reported on salinity, rural dieback, land clearing, and erosion. In the wake of this renewed concern for nature, the late 1970s and the 1980s were marked by intense introspection among landholders, rural communities, government managers, scientists, and the wider public over the state of agriculture and its degradation of the environment.
Research, policy, and community responses ensued. The Focus on Farm Trees conference held at the University of Melbourne in 1980 included presentations from scientists, farmers, and the Victorian state government, with a key theme the need to return trees to over-cleared land. Farm tree groups formed in most states, and Greening Australia coalesced as a national organisation dedicated to revegetation. In 1984, the Potter Foundation funded a program to demonstrate it was possible for landholders to ameliorate degraded land, increase productivity, and operate on an environmentally sustainable basis. Fifteen landholders, all from Victoria’s Western District, participated in the Potter Farmland Plan, the largest philanthropic project of its kind at the time. The trial inspired tree plantings in other regions. Amidst an atmosphere of optimism for rural environmental renewal, Rick Farley became instrumental in forming “a most unlikely alliance” between the National Farmers Federation and the Australian Conservation Foundation. In 1989, encouraged by the possibility of consensus, Prime Minister Bob Hawke announced the Decade of Landcare.
Considering the field of landscape architecture established itself and professionalised in Australia over the same period as the development of keyline design, permaculture, and national recognition that farms needed holistic planning for sustainability, one might have expected some crossover. The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects incorporated in 1970 and the journal Landscape Australia launched in 1978. In her honours research, Sky Allen found only one mention of permaculture in the journal’s index from 1979 to 2001 (a book review of Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual).
Landscape architecture and agriculture converged briefly when RMIT’s Jim Sinatra became involved in the Potter Farmland Plan. Sinatra came to Australia from Penn State, having been schooled in the Ian McHarg tradition, a pioneer in the concept of ecological planning. I spoke with Jock Gilbert, a lecturer in Landscape Architecture from RMIT, who told me Sinatra worked with farmers and the Victorian government to ensure landscape architecture was embedded in the Potter Farmland Plan. As far as Jock is aware, forestry, agriculture and landscape architecture haven’t worked on such a scale since in Australia.
“Landscape architecture moved away from the larger scale and towards landscape urbanism,” said Jock.
Curious to learn more about why there is not a stronger relationship between landscape architecture and agriculture in Australia, I spoke with Christie Stewart of Open Wide Agriculture. Six years ago, Stewart had an ambitious and impressive plan to use her skills in landscape architecture to regenerate her family farm in the West Australian wheatbelt. The land was “stuck in a cycle of continuous degeneration” but just as Stewart was about to graduate, the farm became unviable and her family had to sell before she could put the plan into action. She landed a coveted job with the firm UDLA in Freemantle where she tried to pursue her interest in design and agriculture.
“What we what we found was that virtually no farmer was going to pay fifteen grand for a graphic masterplan,” Stewart told me.
Many traditional farmers couldn’t see the value in using their capital to pay for something that wasn’t direct work on the ground. To retain her connection to agriculture, Stewart took a job one day per week working on a tree planting project for start-up company Open Wide Agriculture.
“I was so inspired by what they do and their vision I asked to join full time,” said Stewart.
She is now Farmland Regeneration Coordinator for the start-up’s food brand Dirty Clean Food. The role involves working with beef, lamb and oat suppliers to develop custom farm plans that meet regenerative principles. The plan includes over fifty on-farm practices drawn from literature and certifications from around the world, including maintaining managed biodiversity conservation areas, wildlife movement corridors, pollinator strips, minimizing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer usage, high density rotational grazing, multispecies cropping, monitoring of soil, water and nutrient cycles, committing to a learning journey, sharing information, animal welfare, and wage fairness.
“It’s like the regenerative farm plan over my parents’ property but instead of a graphic masterplan it’s dot points with words,” said Stewart.
It’s an adaptation of design principles in a form that’s more affordable for farmers who aren’t ready to engage landscape architects. I asked Stewart what might foster more collaboration between farmers and landscape architecture, given she comes from a broadacre farming background herself. She believes firms interested in this space should improve their skills and knowledge for on-the-ground implementation of designs.
“Knowing how to put semi-permanent fencing together, for example, means you know the logical way it’s going to fit when you go to do the drawing,” said Stewart.
While the cost of engaging a landscape architect might put many farmers off, the more significant barrier is cultural. The kind of holistic agriculture that benefits from design and planning is in the minority. Stewart has heard regenerative growers cop flak at the pub.
“Conventional agriculture is a system that is fully integrated and supported by the big seed suppliers and fertilizer companies. They have the agronomists that tell you which input you need to grow your crop,” said Stewart. “It’s reinforced by your parents, your family, your neighbors. It’s hard to break out of.”
Stewart added that farmer Massy, in his book Call of Reed Warbler (UQP, 2017), “summed it up perfectly when he said the biggest change is the one that happens between your ears.”
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