|
|
|---|
Thursday, March 17, 2011
For Hyperculture, Rael San Fratello Architects and Ga-Ga bought a plot of land in Iowa normally cultivated for corn and by turning it into an “interface” present alternatives to the monoculture of industrial agriculture.
Using the same digital tools that produce straight rows of corn, we create an overlay of imagery organized by polyculture. These images change appearance at different “zoom”s, when viewed from above using Google Earth. At altitude +20 km, an image of a chimerical plant appears – not a logo, but a figment composed of multiple species: wild garlic, winter rye, vetch and corn. Zooming in closer to +2 km, each 40-acre parcel breaks into a more abstract pattern of diversely planted rows. Closer still, the rows are tagged with information and a photo of the crops. The Google Earth interface and earth interface unite at this moment, as satellites both direct and mediate food production.
In what sounds like a digitally ornamented CornCam or FarmVille but with a real-world terrestrial component, you control the workings of an actual field. In counter-hyperlocalism style, you program a cadre of farm machinery to till and manage a more variegated crop list using a web interface. It's agriculture informed by digital fabrication, whereby new ecological forms are printed using computer aided techniques.
Perhaps Hyperculture can be reconfigured into a social network game. The whole of Iowa is parsed into small parcels, and each one can be cultivated virtually through an interface on Facebook or with a standalone app. What gets farmed and the quality of the harvest will depend on how much “farm gold” the gamer has to spend on machinery, seeds, water and gasoline. The plot of land can turn out to be an Edenic garden, a recreation of the Dust Bowl or somewhere in between. If one tires of it, then the farm is considered abandoned and allowed to turn feral; given enough time, it might fully revert back to its pre-settlement condition. If a system error occur, nudge the resident Farmer-SysOps to reboot the gamespace.
Friday, March 11, 2011
At first glance we thought these landforms were travertine terraces formed from geothermal springs. The most spectacular examples are invariably referred to as Wonders of the World, attracting intrepid tourists until they are destroyed by the same geological forces that created them.
Edgar Mazo and Luis Callejas, two-thirds of Paisajes Emergentes, pointed out that they are in fact evaporation ponds carved out of the mountains. Located near the town of Maras high in the Peruvian Andes, about 40 km north of Cuzco, they remind one of the Banaue Rice Terraces in the Philippines, but here salt is cultivated and harvested. 
The salt mines, we are also told, have been in operation since at least the Inca period. Numbering in the thousands, the ponds are supplied with water diverted from a subterranean stream through a system of channels. The water is then drawn out through natural evaporation, leaving behind the salt to be collected and later sold at the market.
According to Wikipedia, “The salt mines are available to any person wishing to harvest salt. There are many unused salt pools that are available to be farmed. Any prospective farmer need only find an unoccupied pool to start working.”
Rather than work on an existing pool, why not hollow out new ones? Carve out thousands more and turn the entire valley into a giant outdoor amphitheater, perhaps in imitation of the nearby Inca ruin of Moray.
The entire surface of which will be encrusted with salt, so when the sun shines fully on the valley, the effect will either be magically mesmerizing or blindingly overpowering. Most of the ponds will still be used to gather salt, but a few — those seemingly propped up by pillars of stalactites, the Rococo paw feet of a crystalline tub — might be used for “therapeutic” saline bath by weary travelers.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Returning briefly to the topic of adaptively reused bomb craters, we stumbled upon the above image during a recent nighttime googlegasm. We can't see any signs of aquaculture, such as the jutting scaffoldings of hatchery pens, but National Geographic does assure us that those craters “now serve as fishponds.”
Yet again quoting Places:
These scars are still very much a part of the Vietnamese landscape. In Quang Binh and Vinh Linh provinces (just nort and south of the former demilatrized zone) the landscape resembles the face of the moon, with craters 30 to 50 feet in diameter and several yards deep.
Villagers have transformed the bomb craters into ponds for growing fish, a staple of the Vietnamese diet. In the south, bomb craters are favored sites for houses, with a replinashable source of protein at the doorstep.
One house here, another house there, and still more over there. Soon a city accretes around these calderas, its neighborhoods encircling, like atolls, a necklace of aqueous farmlands, while nearby streets ripple out like wavelets dissipating from the point of impact.
All unexploded ordnances may have long been found and disposed, the soil fully remediated of tactical herbicides and defoliants, all traces of war erased, except of course these bomb craters permanently embedded into the urban grid.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
There's now a central hub from where you can browse through all the posts generated by last week's Food for Thinkers blogfest at GOOD's relaunched Food section. You can read about eating rocks, teaching transgenic food, prison food, growing mushrooms in disused railway tunnels, and many more, all collated into a very filling 16-course tasting menu.
If you have room for a 17th course, we offer our periodic agro-o-rama. Enjoy!
1) Thanet Earth and the Crystal Palaces of the Coming Salad Crisis Era.
2) Soil Maps of Africa: mapping future agro-conflicts.
3) PostNatural Organism of the Month: BioSteel™ Goat.
4) Permitted Habitats: a map of test plots approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for field experiments of GMO crops.
5) Crater Garden: a victory garden flourishing in a blitzed crater in London.
6) Edible Geography: the blog; plus college courses on agro-veillance.
7) Bovine Subway: subterranean highways for livestock.
8) Conflict Flowers: perishable symbols of beauty and romance farmed under economic inequity and environmental exploitation.
9) Foodprint Toronto: an interview with Sarah Rich and Nicola Twilley.
10) Levee Farm: combines two of our most prolific memes: agro-scapes and the littoral edge
11) Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation
On agro
On Agro Redux
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Food writing can begin with swimming pools...
Specifically, Greek swimming pools. We are always reminded of them now whenever we hear news of the financial crisis plaguing Eurozone member countries. Every time, without exception, news of property market bubbles, sovereign debt, IMF bailouts, governments collapsing and violent street protests, including pipe bombs set off by domestic anarchists, not only from Greece but also from Ireland, Portugal and Spain — they inevitably conjure up Suprematist images of shimmering Aegean exclaves.
This is because, as reported by Spiegel last year, Greece has been using creative ways to boost tax revenues and lessen the country's crippling government deficit. These include using Google Earth to find the swimming pools of tax cheats.
Using police helicopters, Greece's financial crimes squad “fly over Athens' affluent suburbs and make films of homes owned by doctors, lawyers and businesspeople. They use satellite pictures by Google Earth to locate country villas, swimming pools and properties. And these tactics have revealed that the suburbs didn't have 324 swimming pools, as was reported, but rather 16,974.”
...which can abruptly make a detour to George Clooney...
If you haven't already heard, the Hollywood superstar contracted malaria while on a trip to Sudan earlier this month. He was there to observe the voting for independence in Southern Sudan and to draw attention to any humanitarian abuses that might arise during and after the referendum. He has since been cured.
No doubt a far less physically taxing way to draw attention to any conflict is through another George Clooney initiative: the Satellite Sentinel project.
A collaboration between Google, the UNITAR Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), Harvard University and celebrity-backed NGOs, the project hires private satellites to monitor signs on the ground that could indicate impending violence, such as troop buildup and movements. The images gathered by the satellites are being made public to let would-be aggressors know that the world is watching them.
“We are the anti-genocide paparazzi,” says Clooney. 
...and deviate halfway around the world further to the Amazon rainforests...
Last year we read about the efforts of the Surui Indians in Brazil to protect their land reservation. “Almost three times the size of New York City,” their patch of the Amazon rainforest is constantly threatened by farmers, loggers, ranchers and gold miners from all sides. They've lost some of their forest to deforestation, but managed to save the rest.
In order to protect what's left, they've teamed up with Google to capture high resolution satellite images to better spot illegal activities on their land. Every inch of their forest will be mapped and displayed on Google Earth.
...before getting to the topic at hand: food.
Tax collectors, tech-savvy indigenous tribes and George Clooney aren't the only ones using remote sensing and GIS applications to monitor and catch acts of criminality. There are also the crop cops at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Aerial Photography Field Office.
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.
It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.
We mentioned this program, called the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), a couple of years ago when food prices were at record levels. Because farmers could earn more money by growing cash crops, they started converting the protective greenbelts back into croplands. In the fall of 2007, according to The New York Times, farmers “took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.”
Then came the global financial crisis of 2008, and food prices declined. But that decline, reports Guernica, “seems to have been an anomaly.”
The December 2010 index of global food prices compiled by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) hit a record 215, one point higher than in the spring of 2008. In fact, some food products, including sugar, cooking oils, and fats, are now trading substantially above their 2008 levels; others, including dairy products, grains, and meat, are inching perilously close to record levels.
So we'll we see more conversion of greenbelts into croplands? And will there be that one farmer who's going to keep their plump subsidies courtesy of foreclosed and unemployed taxpayers while plowing yet even more riches from destroyed wildlife habitats.
But what's a post without a (regurgitated) proposal: The Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation.
The problem with the National Agriculture Imagery Program is that there's just too many farms and too few analysts. Actually, we don't know if there are in fact too few analysts to pore through all those maps. It may be that just one cartographer is that's needed to comb through all the maps of Kansas and can do it in a couple of days.
But why not crowdsource it? Why not release the maps (that is, wikileak them, as they aren't in the public domain due to privacy matters) to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas?
It'd be like Einstein@home, a citizen science project which last year discovered a “disrupted binary pulsar” that may be the fastest-spinning of its kind. But instead of surveying the universe for distant remnants of supernovas, the teeming Web 3.0 masses use their collective clicking power to survey much nearer terrains. Imagine thousands of Google Earth addicts as citizen crop cops panning through digital screens in search of horticultural counterfeits, hours on end trying to spot cornfields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment — and enjoying the outdoors.
This post is part of Food for Thinkers, a week-long series organized by Nicola Twilley for GOOD’s newly-launched Food hub. On Twitter, follow #foodforthinkers.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Foodprint Project will truly go international on Saturday, July 31, when Sarah Rich and Nicola Twilley will head to Toronto to host the next batches of conversations about food and the city.
As a sort of preview of Foodprint Toronto, we asked the two curators a few questions about their multi-city project and the themes forming and informing the discussions.
Pruned: What is the Foodprint Project, and why was it started?
Nicola Twilley: The Foodprint Project is basically an exploration of the ways cities and food shape each other. So far, it's taken the form of panel discussions, one city at a time, but Sarah and I are imagining that it will gradually evolve and expand beyond that format as we go along. We launched it on January 1 this year, as a sort of shared New Year's resolution to take this interest we both have in the relationship between cities and food, and explore it in more depth by getting people with quite different perspectives together to have a public conversation about it—past, present and possible futures. The first conversation was driven by curiosity—both our own in the topic and to see whether other people would be as interested as we are — and now with the second, we're already seeing the potential to start conversations and comparisons between cities, as well as within them. So the precise what and why of Foodprint Project might expand over time—but it all comes out of a sense of the potential of using food as a lens to re-perceive, re-imagine and re-design cities.
Sarah Rich: The two key words I'd sort of add in there are design and place/space (I guess that's three words). The way we want to look at the relationship between food and cities has a lot to do with urban planning, architecture, infrastructure and the way unintentional or intentional manipulations of physical space can steer patterns of consumption and behavior.
Pruned: Many aspects of urban food systems are inextricably linked to a much wider system within an even wider system, from the regional to the national to the continental and then further on up to the inter-continentinal scale. But the project, at least in these first two iterations, is squarely focused on the city. Why this focus?
Twilley: I think a large part of the reasoning behind our city-by-city focus is for exactly the reason you describe: urban food systems are inextricably tied to a much wider system—so we can use the former as a way into the latter. In other words, we can talk about NAFTA in terms of the evolution of the Ontario Food Terminal [pdf] or corn subsidies in terms of bodega inventory. It can be really helpful to have that sort of grounded, place-specific way in to the larger discussion.
Another part of our reasoning is that most people—and more of them everyday—live in cities. Twenty-first-century urbanism is increasingly going to define and reshape our relationship with food: why not try to understand that and even flip it, to see how food could redefine twenty-first-century urbanism.
Pruned: On that last note, I'd like to tease out some of your ideas on how food should inform 21st century urbanism.
Twilley: I’m definitely interested in hearing what our panelists think about that (much more so than answering it myself!). But not to evade the question totally: I am certain food can be a helpful tool in designing and upgrading cities because it is so down-to-earth, everyday, and necessary—yet it is tied to all of the other factors we usually think about optimizing for (for example, economics, health, transportation, land-use, sustainability). So if you evaluated your designs through the lens of food (a sort of “food reality check”), then perhaps you would be sure to consider all those other important factors, in balance, and create a plan that is workable and accessible. These ideas, I should add, were originally very much inspired by architect Carolyn Steel (author of Hungry City).
Rich: In my mind, part of the big challenge around food in the 21st century is in making it a higher priority both within systems and for individuals. In schools, in hospitals, at home, in commercial zones—everywhere we go, the act of feeding ourselves is often an afterthought and the desire to spend money on food is very low. The ramifications touch education, health, tax burdens, environmental quality, the list goes on. As we think about what our cities will look like in the future, I think it's important for food to be an integral part of the conversation so that we design infrastructure and services that improve rather than degrade food systems and human health. Can bodegas manage to stock an inventory that remains relatively cheap without guaranteeing astronomical healthcare costs down the line? Can public spaces facilitate civic engagement around growing food? I think in a way this is the essential goal of Foodprint.
Pruned: Why did you choose Toronto as the next stop? I’m assuming you could have picked any city.
Rich: Toronto came in as our second stop mostly through the urgings and generous encouragement of a few of our connections there. One was Tim Maly, who writes the blog Quiet Babylon. Tim came to Foodprint NYC and he gave us a book at the end called The Edible City, published by Coach House Books, which is a collection of essays by Toronto-based writers all about food in Toronto/Ontario, approached from numerous angles. That book (as well as Food, edited by John Knechtel of Alphabet City) proved to be a great resource and a great way for Nicky and I to dive into understanding the role of food in Toronto. It was immediately clear that many people in Toronto already think about the deep connections between urbanism and food systems, so we felt like the conversations and the audience were there and we had a good opportunity to thread them together in some new ways.
We decided since Nicky and her husband, Geoff, would already be in Montreal for the summer in order for Geoff to do a research fellowship at CCA (and since Toronto's much nicer in summer than winter!), it made sense to head there.
The other early supporters of Foodprint Toronto were Mason White and Lola Sheppard of InfraNet Lab. Once we agreed to bring Foodprint to Toronto, they've all been very helpful connecting us with great people there. It should be said, we first got to know Tim and Mason via Twitter! Twitter's been a major vehicle for driving the success of this project.
Twilley: I’d just add that we always intended Foodprint Project to be an international series, so the idea of doing our second event outside of the US was especially tempting.
Pruned: The names of the panel discussions for Foodprint Toronto are the same from last time. I take it then that you'll be picking up some of the dialogues from Foodprint NYC.
Rich: I don't know that we are picking up specifically on the dialogues from Foodprint NYC, but we are threading some of the same themes and frameworks into this one. We felt it worked well to have these four, which were basically (when you take the titles away) a look at zoning/policy/economics, geography/demographics, the past and the future. These helped guide our search process as we selected panelists to invite, and they help us formulate questions that lead to distinct but complementary sessions
Twilley: I think there are some specific conversations we’ll be picking back up (two examples of questions we’ll ask in both cities, just off the top of my head: the role of different agencies in creating food policy, and the regulations governing street food vending). There are also some conversations I hope we’ll return to in different cities, but we aren’t this time (for example, the city’s foodscape as seen from other species’ point of view). Either way, our discussions will flow from the same basic questions—what can you learn about city when you map it using food as the metric? how do policy, infrastructure, and economics shape a city’s food? and so on—so there will be definitely be thematic overlap.
Pruned: Are there any new trajectories you're planning to pursue?
Twilley: There are definitely some new trajectories we'll pursue, based on the individual research interests and expertise of our panelists as well as the specificities of Toronto's urban/peri-urban context. Toronto has a green belt, for example, so we'll want to talk about that. And in Toronto, we have a First Nations fisherman joining us, so our look at food traditions can extend back some way into pre-Columbian heritage. In other cases, we'll be looking at similar themes in slightly different ways. For example, in NYC, we looked at the future of school food with Amale Androus speaking about Work AC's design for an Edible Schoolyard at P.S. 216, while in Toronto, we'll be looking at shifts in school food over the past fifty years, including the evolution of the concept of “brain food,” with historian Rebecca O'Neill.
Foodprint Toronto will take place on Saturday, July 31, from 12:30 to 5:00 pm, at Artscape Wychwood Barns. Here's a map.
Foodprint Toronto will be open to the public (with seating for up to 400). If you can't make it to the event, the talks will be available to view online.
Lastly, many thanks to Sarah Rich and Nicola Twilley for taking the time to answer our questions.
Monday, April 19, 2010
The eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano has surprisingly led us to wonder about the prevalence of conflict flowers, those perishable symbols of beauty and romance cultivated under economic inequity and environmental exploitation.
“Farmers in Kenya are dumping tonnes of vegetables and flowers destined for the UK, four days after the volcanic ash cloud over Europe grounded cargo shipments from Africa,” reports The Guardian.
Kenya's flower council says the country is haemorrhaging $1.3m a day in lost shipments to Europe. Kenya normally exports up to 500 tonnes of flowers daily – 97% of which is delivered to Europe. Horticulture earned Kenya 71 billion shillings (£594m) in 2009 and is the country's top foreign exchange earner.
The flower trade may have brought much needed investment to the country, but it has also come at a cost. Like so many African countries, Kenya suffers from water scarcity, and flower farms have been blamed for exacerbating the problem through their intensive use of irrigation and pesticides. The use of chemicals has further added to the already poor working conditions. Women are discriminated, child labour is weakly discouraged, and all are paid with unfair wages.
Maybe conditions are less exploitative than how they appear to us from our distant and limited vantage point, but one has still to consider the ethical implications of cultivating vast tracts of prime arable land to produce not foods and goods for the local population but for the gas-guzzling export of what essentially amounts to lazy sentiments commodified by a multibillion dollar global guilt industry.
Perhaps for Mother's Day next month, we'll try to wean ourselves off our addiction to flower porn.
The Machinic Landscapes of Tulips
Monday, April 12, 2010
Edible Geography has another deliriously interesting post, this one on a mythological or not-so mythological tunnel in New York City through which cattle may or may not have been herded on their way from distant pastures to the slaughtering houses in the city.
Real or not, it's fascinating to speculate what might be the ideal geometry of such an underground thoroughfare for livestock. Quoting Nicola Twilley (emphasis ours):
[A]ccording to Temple Grandin, the autistic savant who is also known as “the woman who thinks like a cow,” cattle can happily walk through a tunnel—but only if it’s designed correctly. The ideal cow tunnel, she explains in her book Animals in Translation, would use indirect lighting and a non-slip floor, as well as grey or beige paint, and sound-absorbent surfaces. Any sloping sections would be single file, the tunnel should get bigger along its length in the direction of movement, and finally—fabulously—it should be curved, so that the cattle “just sort of go round and round and round like the Guggenheim Museum.”
Incidentally, we have collected quite a few CAD drawings of cattle sorting pens based on Grandin's ideal sorting program. Their serpentine design takes advantage of the cattle's circling behavior and tendency to want to go back where they came from. Moreover, it prevents the animals from seeing people and other moving objects at the end of the chute.
Splice hundreds of these units together, and you might have the basic configuration of an urban corral. Instead of a (relatively) straight tunnel with sharp turning angles, you have a tunnel smoothly weaving through New York's or some other city's subways, sewers and basement floors like a meandering stream, following perhaps the old route of a desiccated river.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Now our monthly list of blogs and sorta-kinda-maybe-like-blogs blogs. First up is the pick of the bunch:
Edible Geography. After working behind the scenes of BLDGBLOG and contributing marvelous posts for years, Nicola Twilley now has her own blog. Check out her post on mushroom farming in an abandoned railway tunnel and cupcake gentrification.
And the rest:
Animal Architecture. With an interesting niche claimed, all it needs are more projects to post. Help them out with tips.
Delta National Park. John Bass blogs about the contested terrain of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, through which approximately 40% of water in California flows before entering San Francisco Bay and out into the Pacific. Liberally covered are aquapolitics, agriculture, hydro-infrastructure and other spatial systems, from small to large scales. Also be sure to check out the non-blog part of the site.
Diffusive Architectures.
Landezine. With a bit more hard work, a few extra help and guilt-free copy-pasting, it could turn out to be the ArchDaily of Landscape Architecture.
Oh Boym.
Polis. The talented roster of writers include a couple of Where alumni.
Spatial Robots.Subterranea Australis. One of those copy-paste blogs but we're glad it's returned after a summer hiatus, with a changed name, to copy-paste some more.
Tommy Manuel Blog. This interview with the photographer Harald Finster should help you dig in into the archives. The discussion centers on the aesthetics, documentation, preservation and rehabilitation of industrial installations.
For more, check out our
Monday, September 14, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
We're paying a return visit to the Center for PostNatural History, this time for Permitted Habitats, their infographic on genetically modified organisms allowed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for field tests since 1987. This map shows where these neo-florae have been released into the environment, which institutions have applied for the permits to conduct the experiments, and what enhancements these organisms have been engineered with, for instance, drought tolerance and fungal resistance.
Having taken many joyrides over the years throughout Illinois, which according to the map has hosted many of these real world trials, we may have driven past by one or two of these plots. But we wouldn't know. Some protocols may have been set up so that no rogue environmentalists will come and uproot the plants, say, electrified fences or surveillance sensors, but perhaps the best form of quarantine is anonymity and apparent ordinariness. One passes by them oblivious, because they are as unremarkable as the next hundreds of thousands of rows of corns. But of course they're not. To once again borrow from Trevor Paglen, these are genomic dark spots in the landscape, fully alight with the Midwestern sun.
One of the things we like about this map is how the icons pop in and out, sometimes massing together and swelling to shroud an entire state before desiccating gradually. Quiet passages of solitary icons here and there, then a massive pileup; transgenic thunderstorms developing over some skies somewhere, possibly flooding an uncontaminated gene pool with a deluge of foreign DNAs. It's like watching the time-lapsed maps of The Weather Channel.
Or the as yet uncommissioned The Transgenic Weather Channel. Instead of actual meteorological events, it will track these genetic fringes, these dark topographies shrouded in secrecy by Big Agro, Big Pharma and their patent lawyers, for any signs of quarantine breaches. When something jumps over the fence, periodic bulletins will be issued.
High 70s. Clear in the a.m. Thick fog of insulin pollen in the p.m.
Sirens will blast across the whole county.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
We're anxiously waiting for September's PostNatural Organism of the Month [rss] from Richard Pell, postzookeeper of aberrant taxonomies at the Center for PostNatural History. (Or is it an irregular series, not something done on a monthly basis?)
A former pick, and a favorite, is the BioSteel™ Goat, a breed of Angora goat whose genes have been augmented by the Nexia Corporation to produce spider silk in its milk — that is, its milk contains spider silk protein. This “silk milk” is purified, dried and then transformed into microfibers for use in making bullet-proof vests.
Silk spiders are too anti-social to farm successfully, but these genetically modified goats provide a way to manufacture the biomaterial on a commercial scale. There were 40 BioSteel™ Goats produced, according to Pell. Some were sold to the U.S. Defense Department, and these ones “are currently housed in former ammunition bunkers on the now decommissioned Plattsburgh Air Force Base in Plattsburgh, NY. The Nexia Corporation has since been liquidated and purchased by an oil and gas venture. The status of the remaining goats is unknown.”
Could they now be happily grazing on some pastoral meadow (sun-dappled but under a total genomic eclipse), mating with nearby flocks and still more further afield unbeknownst to their owners? Perhaps one should try to track them down, even procure the help of Trevor Paglen to map these biogeographical black spots.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
GlobalSoilMap.net is a project started by a consortium of soil scientists to create a digital soil survey map of the entire world. It's a wildly fantastic undertaking, one which aims to provide an easily accessible tool to address nothing less than the most challenging global issues of our time: food security, climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity and threatened biodiversity.
As avowed addicts of soil maps, we couldn't resist posting some of the gorgeous maps from the site. The maps we have selected, however, are the fading, dusty, conventional kinds — probably those saved from disintegration in some corner filing cabinets of some windowless office of some civil servant and then scanned and archived to help produce the next generation maps.
Specifically, we chose the ones of Africa, because these beautiful abstractions of geology often mask less beguiling ground conditions. In the case of Zimbabwe, its soil maps provide an illustrative history lesson on its colonial past (white farmers settled on the most productive polygons while black farmers were gerrymandered to less productive tendrils and globules) and also on its post-colonial hangover (those same polygons, tendrils and globules are the sites of violent land redistributions under Mugabe). In the case of Ethiopia and Sudan: famine, drought-induced genocide and harrowing stories of displacement.
Once finished, the digital soil maps will be freely available and web-accessible.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
A passing scene or two in a British police drama of the garden variety gritty kind — no need to name the show, but the scenes involved its Northern Irish anti-hero of an undercover cop discovering illegal aliens from Eastern Europe arriving by boats on the blue-toned, cinematically tempestuous North Sea and then being sent off, if not to the brothels, to work unsurprisingly at slave wages in the commercial greenhouses of a light-deprived Norfolk, where the glass-walled foliage provides as much cover from the Home Office as the urban jungle of council estates — those scenes reminded us of Thanet Earth.
Thanet Earth, as described by The Guardian last year, is “Britain's biggest greenhouse development.” Located in Kent, “80 football pitches' worth of greenhouse” will accommodate “1.3 million plants, growing in seven greenhouses, each up to 140m in length and fed by its own reservoir.” The entire complex will be heated by seven power generating stations located on site, and any excess supply of electricity will be sent to nearby towns. It is estimated that when all the greenhouses are completed, the UK's crop of salad vegetables will increase by 15%.
It's huge, massive, perhaps so gargantuan that illegal migrant workers might go undetected among the wild thickets of cucumbers and peppers, lost in the din of pneumatic harvesters, sonorous simulant thunderstorms and the reverberated rustlings of tomato leaves. It's just huge, massive, gargantuan.
Or maybe Thanet Earth is so technolicious, so heavily under surveillance that no stray variable can ever escape its sensors. Speaking to Will Wiles of Icon Magazine, Steve McVickers, Thanet Earth's managing director, says, “We're measuring all the time. Temperature, humidity, the amount of water in the Rockwool; we're looking at the growth of the plants, we're looking at the ventilation, we're looking at where the sun is, we're looking whether it's raining, we're looking at the wind direction. The greenhouse is constantly adjusting itself.”
Phantom EU neo-gypsies displaced by the econopocalypse, non-functioning CCTV cameras, a food crisis, humorless Dutch efficiency experts, a rogue transgeneticist, guerrilla gardeners and allotment nutters, the insufferable Jamie Oliver and the sublime Heston Blumenthal — all converging in that one giant patch of the earth excised from geography, from the cycles of time and even from itself, one day infiltrated by a Northern Irish anti-hero of an undercover (food) cop after reports that tomatoes coming out of these Crystal Palaces have suddenly and improbably started tasting better, sweeter, juicier than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's organic heirlooms, right after the children have also started going missing. This is a story pitch to the BBC.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Last year, we collected all our agriculturally themed posts in a single link-tastic post. We thought we might do the same with all the agriculturally themed posts published since then.
But first we'd like to alert our readers to two marvelous events. One is London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground, a seminar moderated by David Barrie which focused “on what has, is and will be done to increase the integration of food production into the city.” It was held in late May, and lucky for everyone who didn't make it, Nicola Twilley posted a wonderful summary of the talks for BLDGBLOG.
The other is Foodprint: Exhibition currently on view at Stroom Den Haag. Artists and designers in the show include Agnes Denes, Fritz Haeg and Atelier van Lieshout. The exhibition will end in August 23, 2009, but it's actually part of a 2-year-long series of programs exploring “the influence food can have on the culture, shape and functioning of the city, using The Hague as a case study.” For instance, there is Foodprint: Art projects for the city, which will involve new commissioned works. In one of these, Atelier Van Lieshout will make “a machine that turns human meat into food for pigs.” Huh? If you're intrigued (and can read Dutch), you can probably find out more about this machine at the Foodprint: Weblog.
Now on to the link-o-rama.
1) Agro Park: on the competition to design a new hyper-park for Memphis, Tennessee.
2) Locavore Utopia: Work Architecture Company's prequel to their P.S. 1 installation, Public Farm 1.
3) After the Deluge, The Farm: urban farming in post-Katrina New Orleans.
4) The Machinic Landscape of Tulips.
5) Fish Works: N.E.E.D.'s aquafarm proposal for South Street Seaport, New York.
6) Small Food Nation: tiny cows for tiny houses for tiny footprint living.
7) It Still Turns and Returns: the gyroscopic whirligigs of gravity defying cows, sort of.
8) Michael Jackson as Landscape Architecture.
9) Agro-veillance: will our horizons soon darken with a data aviary of pilotless surveillance drones kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?
10) South Central Farms: The Documentary.
11) Aquapod®: what would Buckminster Fuller and Archigram have come up with had they taken up underwater agriculture?
12) Oceansphere™: Cf. Aquapod®.
13) AAgrotecture 1: King's Vineyard London.
14) AAgrotecture 2: Aquaculture.
15) AAgrotecture 3: Farmacy.
16) [farming]: announcing [bracket], a new annual publication from InfraNet Lab in collaboration with Archinect.
17) Baby Farmer: a hazmat suit for USDA certified organic supplier of replicant Jude Laws.
19) AAgrotecture 4: Gastronomic Garden.
20) Ensuring the Future of Food in Japan: Good Japanese eat Japanese food.
21) Arbor tremuloides: a short clip from Our Daily Bread, a feature-length documentary produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter.
22) A Toxic Tour Through Maryland's Industrial Poultry Landscape.
23) Tactical Horticulture: nursery for anti-terrorist shrubs.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Discovered via the breathless Bryan Finoki of Subtopia and his epic feral version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is Sinnoveg, a France-based tree nursery and horticulture research center specializing in “securitizing sites, goods and persons by a concept of anti-intrusion security integrated into the environment.” As described, this “natural concept is based on planting of a hedge of thorny plants, weaved into each other and into metallic elements of reinforcement.”
According to Agence France-Presse, the company has planted “vegetation barriers around a nuclear research centre outside Paris, a juvenile detention centre, train stations and airports.” And now, they want to take their patented shrubs to Baghdad's Green Zone and replacing its “vast network of concrete blast walls with terrorist-proof trees and bushes.”
To make the vege-walls more secure, “traditional barbed wire, tyre spikes, sensors and even metal barriers can be placed within the hedges - an invisible back-up layer of security sure to surprise any potential suicide bomber.”
Monday, December 1, 2008
Using a recent article in the New York Times on Maryland's poultry industry, an itinerary could be cobbled up together that might begin at a “farm with 150,000 chickens.” There, peripatetic toxic tourists will marvel and then scale “mountains of manure” before undertaking a typical British ramble through the drainage basin of the Chesapeake Bay, scoping the terrain for lesser contour lines, for swales, for ditches where rivulets and streams spiked with phosphorous and nitrogen might be flowing en route to the estuary and its oxygen-depleted algae gardens — reading the landscape with the hermeneutic attention of a Talmudic scholar, as it were.
Like any rambler with rights of way, or for that matter the overwhelming odor from “650 million pounds of chicken manure” which drifts about, indifferent to territory and borders like a vaporous cloud, they will not be confined by and indeed can trespass over metes and bounds.
For fans of the vernacular architecture of pre-crisis industrial agriculture and Flickr habitué, there will be plenty of opportunity to take photographs of the tour's architectural highlight: “500-foot-long chicken houses [that] stretch from the roadways like airplane hangars” and whose “gigantic fans suction ammonia from the birds’ waste, filling the air for miles around.”
On agro
Monday, November 24, 2008
A lazy post for a lazy Monday, but hopefully you'll find it interesting. It's a short clip from Our Daily Bread, a feature-length documentary produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter.
Having never wondered how pecans and walnuts are harvested on an industrial scale and then seeing how it's actually done for the first time, we were quite taken aback. It was as if discovering a new species of marine animal thriving in the violent hydrothermal whirlpools of some deep-oceanic trench — spectacularly ornamented, wondrously strange, marvelous.
Our reaction obviously says more about how far removed we are from the means of food production than anything about an inherent quality, but agricultural landscapes never fail to astonish us.
On agro
