DREAMS AND ASPIRATIONS
Fall 2060. The soft sound of birds chirping, chatting about the multitude of insects they have at their disposal, accompanies the warm morning light filtering through the open kitchen window. I find myself preparing a holiday meal for family and friends using only the fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, and fungi I have either grown or harvested myself or sourced hyper locally. Outside, family and friends gather around the backyard telling stories about the time humans used to grow monoculture crops with disease causing chemicals, and about how we turned lifeless topsoil into black, carbon rich grassland grazed by herds of cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, and ducks. Later, the night sky above is painted brightly with the milky way galaxy on full display, brought back to life due to the firm light pollution guidelines set in place. I sit outside with my grandkids telling them mystical stories of far off stars and worlds that they can see with their very own eyes… In forty years, this is the kind of
world I would love to see and live in. I feel like this is how every single person truly wants to live deep down. However, with the current trajectory of our civilization, this fever dream of a fantasy reality seems to be just that, a fantasy. Our international scale centralized food system is more fragile than ever, the little topsoil we have left is vanishing, people are entirely disconnected with their food, fresh water is becoming more scarce each year, political systems and mass media are trying to and succeeding in telling people what they should and should not eat, and the meat/no meat debate is just another divisive talking point at the dinner table. The cynic in me is saying that all hope is lost and there’s no return from the canyon we have dug ourselves into. But the optimist in me is stronger and keeps reassuring me that there is still time to do everything I can to help the world along to achieve my fantasy reality.
The agricultural problems we are facing today and will continue to face until we can reform policy at a national level, affect each and every American citizen. Western diseases such as cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and more are at an all time high. With the argument that these are mostly preventable through proper “diet” and lifestyle choices, I find the many problems centered around the agricultural industry the most important that I want to turn my career as a landscape architect on to. Throughout this article I’ll approach various questions I have wanted to answer for a while. What do these problems have to do with landscape architecture? What impact does landscape design have on agriculture? What landscape architecture projects have been centered around agricultural practices? Is this endeavor fruit-less without a restructuring of agricultural government policy? (pun intended) Maybe it’s naivety or desperation but I really feel that Landscape Architecture could hold the key to unlock the reconnection with our food, replenish our ecosystems, and re-align the human race with the natural world. It’s presenting and analyzing the ways that landscape architecture projects have addressed food production through design that I hope to answer these questions.
CURRENT STATE
As briefly touched on before, there are a wide range of issues that we face today as a collective society, in this case the topic of exploration are the issues relating to agriculture and our failing food system. Poor nutritional value in the food we are eating is a large contributing factor to the obesity epidemic in America. The causes behind this are extremely in depth and too extensive to discuss fully in this paper, but it is largely due to governmental policy and big brand lobbying. In short, monocrop agricultural products such as wheat, soybeans, corn, peas, and sorghum are incredibly cheap to produce. These products are ultra-processed into the human consumable foods that are sweeping across the market today, marketed as vegan options like “Impossible or Beyond Burgers.” These products marketed as “healthy” and “ethical” alternatives to meat are quite the opposite. The protein in these foods is not as bio-available for our bodies, there are many synthetic ingredients that most people can’t even pronounce, and the base ingredients like soy or sorghum were most likely grown in a monocrop setting sprayed with intense chemicals that devastate the local ecosystem. All of this being said, these “vegan” options are cheap to produce and are
becoming more attractive to big brands’ bottom line.
Unfortunately, the desire to meet the bottom line in our food system has been destroying the natural ecosystems across the United States and the world at large and our internal ecosystems at the human level. Chemicals are sprayed, fields are tilled, seeds are planted, chemicals are sprayed, plants are harvested, and the cycle continues, in turn eradicating all larger life and microbial life on millions of acres of farmland around the country. Without microbial life in the soil, plants do not get nearly enough of what they need to produce a nutrient packed fruit, vegetable, or grain. This trickles down to our immaculate, bug free supermarkets, where we place nutrient poor vegetables into our carts or just skip the vegetables entirely and go for the hyper-palatable processed foods brought to you by monocropped corn and soybean products. These things can and most likely are causing the myriad of health problems we have been dealing with over the past 40-50 years. Humans have been eating meat for thousands of years and it is documented nowhere that eating meat is the cause of western diseases such
“...unlock the reconnection with our food, replenish our ecosystems, and re-align the human race with the natural world .”
as heart disease and obesity. It has to be a combination of ultra-processed, hyper palatable foods and drastic increases in sedentary lifestyles that have become common over the past 50 years.
CASE STUDIES
Again, what does this have to do with landscape architecture? Well, actually a lot. Strides are being taken to implement agricultural practices and methods into landscape architecture projects, at many scales. Whether it’s a half acre plot in a backyard or a college campus, bringing food production into landscape design can have a lasting impact on the users of the space. One of the largest contributors to the issues we discussed in the previous section is education or lack thereof about our food. Bringing educational experiences into agricultural landscape design, in my opinion, needs to happen in every “farmscape” project.
One example bringing an agricultural experience to an education institution is the 2004 Shenyang Architectural University designed by Turenscape and the Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture. This campus retains the historical agricultural use of the land, integrating crop production with university life (Lickwar 172). The geometry and function of the urban design accentuates the seven acres of rice fields, calling attention to the region’s cultural heritage. “The cultivation of rice connects the university community to a regional heritage at risk, providing a cultural education about local agricultural traditions.” Although students and faculty can only really get their hands dirty two times a year, once in mid-May when the rice is planted and again in late-October when it is harvested, they stay connected to the agri-cultural landscape around them throughout the year. On a daily basis they observe and study the growth cycles of the rice and the micro-ecosystem it fosters. Even though the rice is planted and harvested in a monocrop manner, I think the resulting ecological improvements of the revived rice-fish farming practices outweigh the limited plant diversity. Frogs, fish, and freshwater crabs began to inhabit the rice paddies, due to the ecological improvement and habitat creation of the campus. These frogs and crabs as well as the rice are harvested, “contributing to delicious meals no longer solely sourced from distant farms.” “These new hybrid systems are designed to be legible and understood as urban landscape,
“...no longer solely sourced from distant farms .”
thereby challenging the notion that agriculture is necessarily rural. The aesthetic of the project adapts farming forms to the contemporary context of the university campus.” Ecological systems such as stormwater are dealt with in both an aesthetic and functional way in the form of a stunning central reflecting pool. Path hierarchy is tailored to both the human scale and farm equipment, serving both human circulation and access for tending. This project proves that “agriculture can be adapted to meet the constraints of the urban environment.” Using landscape design to make farming more visually palatable for the user or visitor of the space is key if we want to educate more urban centered people about the food they consume. I think this is an important precedent to discuss because of its direct involvement and exposure on a higher educational campus. Not only does it provide educational experiences for people who visit and use it on a daily basis, it is located at an architectural educational institution. It directly influences and encourages projects and research by the students connecting to the region’s agri-cultural history. These design students can then take what they were exposed to at Shenyang and incorporate it into their professional work, bringing more agricultural design projects to people around the world.
Daily activities among the agricultural fields.
Flipping the script, a great example of bringing educational experiences to a farming operation, through beautiful landscape design, is Apricot Lane Farms located just north of Los Angeles, California. I first learned about this farm through a documentary I stumbled across called, “The Biggest Little Farm.” It is a beautiful film that evokes intense emotion and instills a glimmer of hope for agriculture in anyone who watches it. After watching it a few times I decided to do some additional research and started to read about what they do on their website and social media. The obvious main focus of the 214 acre farm is producing an abundant variety of fruits, vegetables, and animal products. Secondary endeavors include; running a farm school where curriculum is centered around studying and interacting with the many systems present on the farm, providing an internship program for people interested in working on the farm, and offering guided public tours of the farm where they educate people of Los Angeles, the greater
area, or anyone who wants to visit their regenerative approach to farming. “Led by their farming mentor Alan York, and fueled by Molly’s tireless optimism and tenacity, they began their journey to regeneration, bringing life, nutrients, and biodiversity back to the land, which once was home to lifeless soils and a monoculture orchard of avocado trees.” The farm now regeneratively grows more than 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables, raises sheep, cows, pigs, chickens and ducks with care and respect, while working in harmony (or a comfortable level of disharmony) within a dynamic ecosystem. This example of bringing educational experiences to a farming operation has not only inspired and educated a lot of the general public about a healthy local food system, but it has also supported the farm itself through ticket sales for those tours. A solid financial foundation allows a farm like this to hire the additional help it needs to function at 110%. Unlike a conventional farm where fields lay empty most of the year and do not require human or
animal feet to ever touch the fields, Apricot Lane Farms takes a different approach. In their regenerative system, all of the farm animals play a key role in the growth and vitality of their produce gardens and orchards. Sheep graze the grass underneath the orchard trees, ducks follow them plucking snails off of the tree trunks, bees buzz about pollinating everything in sight, chickens peck and scratch at the soil bringing up tiny insects, etc. All the while, these animals are leaving behind waste that goes back into the soil, feeding the microbes, building the overall soil organic matter on the farm. Increasing soil organic matter and improving overall soil health is a key factor and the overall goal in regenerative agricultural practices. Fresh water used for irrigation is becoming more of a dream on a daily basis, rendering it ever more important to hold onto every drop we can. The best way to do this is to improve absorptive-capacity around the farm so the soil can do all of the work. Retaining water within the soil for long periods of time reduces the
amount of irrigation water needed, and can even recharge local wells and aquifers. As said in “Climate” by Charles Eisenstein, “Hydrological health is a happy side effect of soil health.” Apricot Lane Farms has done this, they have gone from soil where water would have sheet flowed completely off of the farm to where their soils can store many inches to maybe even a few feet of rainfall. Considering California seems to be on fire all of the time now, having healthy and wetter soils could act as a first line of defense against any wildfire event that tries to come onto their farm.
“...Hydrological health is a happy side effect of soil health .”
Fusing educational opportunity with an agricultural setting is one of the most important aspects of this design fusion. A vast majority of the general public, including myself 90% of the time, have no idea where their food is coming from or really what ingredients it contains. We read misleading labels at the grocery store that claim they are “organic” or “freerange” and tell ourselves that we are healing the planet when we buy these products, when they most of the time mean nothing. Loose labeling guidelines allow big companies to label non-organic products as such to increase their prices without changing the method of producing that product. At the end of the day, we are being lied to through attractive marketing and we are believing them. This is why places like Apricot Farms, the Shenyang campus, and a lot of local farms around the country that offer educational tours or experiences are so important. They shed light on the necessity to buy local produce, meat, grain, and dairy products if we truly want to buy “local”, “organic/regenerative”, and “free-range.”
Taking a short day trip out to a local farm is a calming and revitalizing experience. Taking a break from the dystopia of urban life and immersing yourself in nature among plants and animals is refreshing and has been proven to improve mood, decrease stress, lower blood pressure, and a lot more physical and mental health benefits. Chances are you will come away from that experience having a completely changed outlook on our food system and will most likely respect and appreciate the work local farms are doing, hopefully encouraging you to want to buy local on a regular basis. Re-educating people, even if it’s one person at a time, will spread good information about local regenerative ag like a flood through our society.
While Apricot Lane Farms was not designed by a professional landscape architect or even designer, it is still organized in a beautiful way and maintained where it is quite aesthetically pleasing, making the experience of visiting it even more appealing to the aesthetic desiring people of Los Angeles. A “farmscape” does not necessarily require a landscape architect to be designed. Vernacular gardens and farms can be just as beautiful as professional landscape architecture projects, when organized well. Some of the most well known vernacular gardens are the parisian kitchen gardens in the 16th-18th centuries. Some of these gardens were not solely meant for producing all of the food the population of Paris required at the time, but also for ornament and promenade by their wealthy owners. Maintaining a beautiful kitchen garden was a symbol of status among the
elite during this time. The produce grown in these gardens provided all of the food the houses needed and any surplus was then sold at the legendary Les Halles marketplace in the center of the city. This market included produce from market gardens, kitchen gardens of private houses, gardens belonging to ecclesiastical communities, the lay elite, and crops grown in the gardens, orchards, and fields of the Parisian countryside. These vegetables, herbs, and fruits were consumed fresh, rather than being dried or preserved, increasing the need for the produce to be grown within the city or just outside. Only foods grown and processed specifically for preservation could be produced in more distant regions. Harkening back to the reality of our food system in America today, where produce is picked before it is even ripe from hundreds to thousands of miles away, before the food has had the proper amount of time to pack itself full of vital nutrients, and ripens while it is transported to whatever supermarket it is destined for. Picking a ripe, fresh fruit or
vegetable and eating it right away is the most nutrient dense and best method of consuming it, and these parisians were doing just that. “But obviously the population during this time was much lower during that time… This can’t be scalable today can it?”
During the 16th-18th centuries, the population in Paris peaked at around 1780 when it hit 600,000 residents. Yes, these 600,000 residents ate all local food produced by these gardens. This would be comparable to the population of Denver, Colorado in 2021 where they had just over 700,000 people. Decentralizing our food system and moving to a localized market around the country is absolutely scaleable, it’s just completely not possible with how government funding is being spent and the way that agricultural subsidies are dispersed. Gov’t spending is focused on keeping big ag on top, and will need a complete reform of policy before the localized food system will reign supreme. The system works, it has been done before and was being done in America until around the end of World War II when chemical weapons of war were rebranded as agricultural fertilizers and we started importing nearly all of our fresh produce from Mexico.
So, there is obviously a place in this system for vernacular gardens such as the parisian style kitchen gardens, the local produce farms around America today, and Apricot
Five main growing areas outside the city of Paris. c. 16th - 18th century.
Early greenhouse concept drawing, displaying new technologies to prolong growing seasons.
Lane Farms. There is room for heavily designed and organized projects such as the Shenyang Architectural University, but what about projects that incorporate both professional design and the vernacular? In order to briefly explore this fusion, I’m going to look at the Nærum Allotment Gardens designed by Sørensen in 1948-1952, located in Nærum, Denmark. First, what is an allotment garden? “Allotment gardens were intended to empower the working class, providing equitable access to garden space for those who could not afford to purchase land.” Described as a “refuge from the overcrowded conditions of dense city living,” these gardens “improved the quality of life and supported the independence of working people by providing city dwellers with the means to grow their own food.” As described in Lickwar’s “Farmscape’’, in place of the functional forms of agricultural efficiency - rows, grids, rectangular plotsSørensen’s drawings for the garden show a geometric patterning of elliptical forms, a strangely beautiful motif of deceiving simplicity… Forty-four elliptical hedges, oriented perpendicular to the contours of the land, enclose 400-square-meter gardens… A maximum of two structures are permitted within the garden. Their combined footprint may be no more than forty square meters, or 10 percent of the total garden area… Community
interaction is supported by the interstitial spaces between gardens, where children play and adults gather. Narrow, onemeter-wide, maze-like spaces bordered by tall hedges give way to grassy open space. A small fruiting hedge in all cases divides the productive space from the habitable space. So, while Sørensen provided four different plans for the interior space of these ellipses, the owners of these allotment gardens, over the years, have organized and designed their garden to best fit their needs and desires.
- “The cultivation of a plot of land feeds a physical need and one much deeper, the need to cultivate beauty, to feed the soul through prolonged intimate interaction with the soil. No richer knowledge of place, no deeper relationship with the soil beneath one’s feet, is formed than that which is created through the act of cultivating the land, feeding the body through the fruits of one’s labors, feeding the intellect and the soul through the making of a place of beauty.”
Aerial view of the Nærum Allotment Gardens.
Sørensen provided a professionally designed backbone for fortyfour vernacular gardens to shine in character and personality. The gardens are still in use today and are still used to produce food, unlike some projects that have failed or have seriously declined in productive use like Village Homes in Davis, California. The Nærum Allotment Gardens have stood the test of time and have proven that the blending of design and the vernacular can work.
CONTEMPLATIONS
So, is this endeavor of integrating landscape design and agriculture together fruitless without a restructuring of government Ag policy? I do not think so, I think that a change in policy will only happen after the groundwork has been laid and the evidence is plain as day through more successful projects being completed. Even if mass change in policy still doesn’t happen at that point, the lives that were improved, the lessons learned, the reconnection to people’s food through those projects will make the effort completely worth it. The impact that landscape architecture projects have on people in urban environments is apparent, they provide opportunities for people to interact with green space, to observe animals and insects, to exercise and play with family and friends, or to relax and unwind after a difficult day at work. It has been studied and proven that exposure to natural environments improves physical and mental health. It is the incorporation of food, edible plants, and husbandry that I get really excited. The natural systems in a functioning regenerative setting are so fascinating and need to be observable by so many more people than what is currently available. Strides are being taken through existing landscape architecture ←→ agriculture projects, various documentaries, books, podcasts, and social media pages but there is still much more work and research to be done to speed the positive impacts along. This paper has helped me gather some of my thoughts on this topic to synthesize into an analysis of sorts, but I still feel as if I have only scratched the surface of this broad topic of discussion and research. There are so many important aspects to touch on, consider, and design for it’s fairly difficult to write about all of that without writing a 200 page book. Maybe next time. All in all, the hybridity between landscape architecture and our food systems is essential to highlight moving into an age of degraded soils, scarce freshwater, ever increasingly nutrient
poor food, and all time highs of western diseases. There isn’t one answer to this question and the many problems I have laid out. Like the farms themselves, this topic is incredibly complex and there is no one single way to do things. Each project is totally unique due to variations in local ecology and the resources available. With the help and experience of professional designers and landscape architects, I believe the future of food in America could be turned around completely and that fever dream of a fantasy reality may not be as fantastical as one might assume.
