THE FARM

ECOSYSTEM SERVICES ESTIMATION EXPERIMENT:
The prevailing economic orthodoxy, by which we are trained to describe and value our daily relationships with society, the world, and the biosphere, maintains this assumption inherited from the 18th c. that natural resources are unlimited, and consequently their value tends towards zero. This in effect invisibilizes and devalues the material dependencies of our societies in ecosystems. How to describe anew our relationship with the living world, and the circulation of energy and matter in the biosphere, in order to hyper-visibilize these dependencies instead of obscuring them?

As a response, “The Farm” experiment consists of one square meter of wheat cultivated completely artificially in a closed environment where all inputs are controlled and measured (water, light, nutrients...). This protocol allows to estimate the orders of magnitude of material and energy flows otherwise provided by ecosystems on arable land. The aim is thus to hyper-visibilize the immense scale of ecosystem contributions, an implicit affluence, fundamental to all human and non-human processes, which is invisibilized by convention in neo-classical economics.

Solar Share (The Farm) seeks to demonstrate a fundamental and paradoxical challenge to the proposal from agro-industries to provide for the nutritional needs of large urban populations, through grow houses and other artificially controlled environments. This 1 square meter experiment makes manifest the vast technical infrastructure and energy flows required to grow a staple food such as wheat in an artificial environment. In today’s economy it is profitable to artificially produce agricultural products with high water content such as leafy greens and tomatoes.

However, from a systemic understanding, this apparent profitability and efficiency of the current system relies on the availability of cheap fossil energy, unaccounted-for resource extraction and pollution all over the globe, incurred in subordinate processes from mining and electronics manufacture, to international freight. The present experiment seeks to reveal the numerous layers of invisibilized interdependencies, and to provide a speculative reference reckoning of the incalculable ecosystem services at play in conventional agriculture.


CONCEPTION: DISNOVATION.ORG, BARUCH GOTTLIEB
WEB DEVELOPER: JÉRÔME SAINT-CLAIR
HARDWARE DEVELOPERS: VIVIEN ROUSSEL, THOMAS DEMMER
INSTALLATION, 1M2 OF AUTOMATED CULTIVATION, LED GROW LIGHTS, CAMERA, LIVE VIDEO STREAMING
PRODUCTION: iMAL (BE) | COPRODUCTION: Biennale Chroniques (FR)
SPECIAL THANKS TO OLIVIER LE CORRE AND LAURENT TRUFFET (ÉCOLE DES MINES DE NANTES).
PRESS: IMAGES FROM IMAL | IMAGES FROM 3BISF

“Vertical farms in cities can produce — profitably — hydroponically grown leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and herbs, all with far less water than conventional agriculture requires. But the produce contains merely a trace of carbohydrates and hardly any protein or fat. So they cannot feed cities, especially not megacities of more than 10 million people. For that we need vast areas of cropland planted with grains, legumes, and root, sugar, and oil crops, the produce of which is to be eaten directly or fed to animals that produce meat, milk, and eggs. The world now plants such crops in 16 million square kilometres — nearly the size of South America — and more than half of the human population now lives in cities. [...] Vertical farms can’t substitute for much farmland, and the claims made for them have been exaggerated. ” [1]

[1] Vaclav Smil (June 2018). IEEE-Spectrum.

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iMAL, Brussels, 2020 [BE]
3 BIS F, Aix-en-Provence, 2020 [FR]

Press Kit & HD Images: Flickr

Production: iMAL Brussels (BE) | Coproduction:Biennale Chroniques, Aix-en-Provence (FR) | With The Support Of: Production Intérieure Brute (FR), ArTeC Paris (FR), Le Labomedia Orléans, (FR) CNC (Dicréam)(FR), University of California Irvine (USA)

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