landlogics

Technology providing both dairy-farmer and cow flexibility and opportunity in milking cycles.

One of my favorite agricultural technologies is the Automated Milking System (AMS); initially developed by Dutch dairy-farmers seeking ways to grant both themselves and their cows with the flexibility to work on their own schedules (as opposed to traditional farming which keeps animals confined and on a tight production schedule, taxing for both farmers and cows alike), the technology has now entered a phase of globally competitive development.

The technology is referred to as a system because it actually changes the logistics and organization of a dairy parlor.

Read the rest of this entry »

View Midwest-Agri Tour: Kansas in a larger map

The following post is a summary of a meeting Fei and I had with Professor Dr. Gerad Middendorf of Kansas State University’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work. Oddly enough Dr. Middendorf’s office is in the same building as the College of Agriculture, coincidence?

The following post is a summary of a meeting Fei and I had with Associate Dean Don Boggs of
Kansas State University’s College of Agriculture, in Manahattan, Kansas.

Rule By Obeying Nature's Laws - Kansas State University Seal

WHAT FOOD IS?

Right from the start Fei and I knew this would be a very different encounter from what we had experienced at The Land Institute. The difference between the alternative thinking research facility to a government and industry sponsored Land Grant University was most notably felt on the level of defining what food is.

Read the rest of this entry »

2009 Prairie Festival-Land Institute - courtesy http://www.flickr.com/people/ddimick/

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is an internal discussion on who, and what forces the shape of cities.

Fes, Morocco. Non-automobile-driven settlement. Taken from Yahoo! Maps.

Los Angeles, U.S.A. Automobile-driven settlement. Taken from Yahoo! Maps.

Although architects, urban planners and urban designers claim to professionally hold the title of spatial designers (as I would like to call them), they operate (willingly or not) under the sphere of a more influential force – that of technology. Reading this article in Wired magazine while also researching Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City this summer has led me to believe that recent forms of urbanisms and infrastructures are far from being “planned” and “designed” by spatial designers – spatial designers are merely designing responses to the new needs of spatial organization that the uses of new technologies put upon our environment. In other words, these needs are not generated by spatial designers, but by innovators.
Read the rest of this entry »

The recent outbreak of Salmonella in eggs across the US has prompted a blaze of news articles, blogs entries, and tweets added to a continuously growing (recent cases of tainted food products included the Mad Cow Disease and Salmonella in spinach) outcry of confusion and mistrust around American food.  Why are these events still happening?!

A recent article on the issue from the New York Times “Growing Concern About Tainted Eggs After Recall” raised some very interesting points about farms and scale; one of the most obvious is that the larger your food supplier is the chance of a problem affecting a wider scale of consumers is greater.  The recent recall of an additional 170 million eggs from 14 states has now totaled over half a billion eggs nation-wide. Basically, that means that there is approximately enough eggs being recalled (wasted) that could have fed the entire nation’s protein needs for 2-days! (1-egg = 1 out of 2-protein servings recommended in a day, source: USDA serving recommendations).

I am sure the economies of scale for an ‘operation’ like Hillandale Farms have developed it into one of America’s largest egg producers, but the risks in managing and dealing with such large problems should be enough (as if the Mad-Cow’s and Sick Spinach was not enough) to say that there are very clear LOGISTIC limits on how large certain things can get.  So, the question is now…what do we do? One of the growing possible solutions is ‘screw’ the large scale farmers, we only want to eat foods from people we know and can see, or that we can grow ourselves.  We’ve heard about urban agriculture and small scale farming, there are even recent competitions to develop self maintained chicken coops (managed completely by an individual who can sell to market)…and it is probably a move in the right direction for securing one’s own personal food security (to a degree) but is that the only answer? The urban agriculture scene has become quite rampant in the design and architectural scene, such as redesigning your neighborhood farmer’s market or designing small organic boutique wineries or the ubiquitous vertical-farm…but this still leaves behind a MAJOR issue (or design opportunity) for our prescribed nutrition needs 1. how can we fill our other food-pyramid needs (such as Grains, Dairy, and Protein) which usually take up larger land-areas to produce them efficiently – which has become the area of nutrition most recently afflicted by health-safety issues.

One of the ways I have been recently looking into this comes from a group of people likened by both alternative agriculture thinkers such as the Land Institute in Salina KS, as well as by agricultural educators who keep a keen eye on larger systems such as at the Center for Great Plains Studies…which is to consider and Agriculture of the Middle.  This idea has been rekindled by a group under the same name (Agriculture of the Middle) who are currently conducting a series of investigations trying to find benefits and validity to medium sized farming operations (on MANY different levels such as economics, ecology, food-safety, and regional food-security).  They have a keen interest in developing reports that will hopefully sway policies to encourage and foster small scale farmers to ‘scale-up’ and contribute to a regional food-web.

I think there could be some real room for thinking about how design (whether urban/rural/architecture) can play a role in encouraging such action by synthesizing more components to such a movement for the middle…how by blending either a few forms of productivity, access, symbiotic-businesses, recreation, or experience a really interesting economic model as well as an interesting urban pattern might arise.

It is time to get brutally entrepreneurial in order to start getting these ideas off the ground.  The National Threat Advisory should be at RED, you could wake up in the middle of the night with a sever case of diarrhea (we are being threatened by our own systems)…

Let's imagine a new array of 'implements' produced by artists and ecologists able to transform the tractor into experience machines.

The tractor’s conquest of America Part II. Along our recent tour of the United States, I was amazed at the degree of tractor use! Basically, the only other major piece of equipment I have seen throughout the agricultural landscapes has been the Self-Propelled Sprayer.  Of course the fleet of vehicle types one would find across agricultural landscapes depends entirely on the season and crop type, but despite our shift from region to region (starting on the West Coast and now in the Midwest) the presence of the tractor is everywhere, for it seems like any task.  The PTO (Power Take Off) is a huge reason for the tractors conquest across America, a system in the power-train of a tractor that allows additions ‘implements’ to a tractor to receive power from the engine.

One of the most interesting points about the PTO is that it has been universally standardized by the ISO, meaning that regardless of your tractor type the PTO is going to be universally designed to adapt to any third party plug-in ‘implement’.  This could be quite an opportunity for two scenarios of rethinking our current agricultural practice:

1. We can design different power-trains or ‘tractor’ like machines that can deliver power sources to a field, perhaps smaller such as in medium-sized agricultural landscape projects (closer to cities).

2. We can design an incredibly diverse range of ‘implements’ that can be used by the huge existing armada of tractors across not just American but worldwide agricultural projects.  Let’s think about designing an implement that can restore landscapes, or as it may need to irrigate/mist crops produce rainbows.  If we are going to have tractors lets give them some new capabilities knowing that a whole fleet of them and farmers world wide can tap into a common implement.  Instead of tractor pulls there could be implement tournaments with a display of wild and productive effects!

Rainbow produced over the UN building in New York (Rainbow Maker's World)

Matthew with the newborn BEAK

This inaugural post explains how to get a Canon SD870s working with Brooxes BEAK kit and the GentLED-CHDK –  using Mac OSX.

Read the rest of this entry »

Meeting at Trinity Bellwoods Park Gate

This was a Jane’s Walk I attended called City Farmers and Locavores: Free Food in the City.

Read the rest of this entry »