Transcript:
Troy: Janna Bystrykh is a long-time collaborator and former member of AMO. She helped to lead the studios at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has been participating in the research around the way that agriculture is shaping the landscape in Middle America.
Janna: Route 281 is known as this main route that connects north to south. What started really as a fascination with one route evolved into this whole project on industrial farming, precision farming in the US, and the ambition to look at it from different perspectives. Precision farming is not a specific part of a process. It’s a collective term for everything that facilitates the farmer to be more precise in the way he practices, based on technology—and whether it’s satellite technology, whether it’s a geolocation, all of those things. And so what a lot of them do is they use satellite-footage, near-infrared imagery to actually analyze the volume of biomass—so the volume of plants that is on the ground. And based on that, they can say a lot of things. They can say, “Okay, my crop is healthy in this part of the field and it’s unhealthy in that part of the field.” And then it’s up to them to go back and figure out: is it a weather issue, or there’s not enough nutrition in the soil, or maybe I didn’t plant enough seeds.
We were talking to one farmer, Gary Wagner. He’s one of the early adopters of all this technology and runs a few fields almost in full on this principle. So this year he has a drone which does this kind of analysis of the plants. He’s able to guide his plants one by one and therefore make his operation much more precise, cheaper, effective—but also better for the environment, because he uses less herbicide, he uses less pesticide, he wears his machinery less, and so on.
So there’s a lot of optimization that is possible through this. But at the same time, there are also a lot of farmers that just use this equipment to farm faster and bigger, and that is, of course, stressful for the soil, stressful for the environment. And that is a debate that I think is very telling of the region at the moment. On the one hand, where we’re coming from is from a tradition of going bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger in every possible way—farming more land, bigger machinery, faster, bigger outputs, bigger inputs—to an opportunity to actually splinter off that and go into healthy farming, because the technology can really farm better. But there has to be a choice, and in the US it has to be almost an individual choice with support. But it is sort of a farmer-by-farmer choice, unlike in Europe, for instance, where a lot of it is subsidy based, and there is a lot more steering from the government. When you’re out there, what you see: So on one hand you see all these fields, and they’re endlessly the same to a certain extent. But at the same time, it represents a lot of technology, a lot of innovation, and a lot of tensions, as well, in terms of how we farm, how we treat our land, how do we move forward. There is a lot of optimism and opportunity and excitement that with technology. This industrial agriculture that has a name of being stressful to the soil, stressful to the environment, and stressful to so many other way—there is an opportunity to do this in a healthy way. There is an opportunity to also be part of a new market, a very exciting market. But it is part of a very big system of big companies, and it’s very challenging to figure out how to make those shifts.
Architecture and urbanism is kind of two fields that interact a lot. And in a way I think what this show really talks about is processes that shape our environment. And that is also where architecture is heading....
