Introduction

The exceptional Indian chef, author, and actor Madhur Jaffrey once observed that as she got older the land beckoned to her more. But for me that beckoning is not only a return to the land as a farmer, but an experience of the land via my 40-plus years as an architect. I have over the past 20-years and through these overlapping experiences, created an energy-saving technology that can enable farming as an instrument of climate change mitigation, a solution that can be at the heart of resilient communities, and an instrument for the re-localization of food production, new-economy job-creation, and healthy diets. I believe if we carefully observe the systems and possibilities of nature, nature can inform new technologies that better serve the world. Project Ninety10 is a real-world manifestation of those ideas. It proposes a 90% reduction in four-season farming energy use and land use, and the full integration of net-zero energy and carbon positive building systems based on green energy. Located on a farm in the Hudson Valley, and comprising a greenhouse on 30-acres of rewilded forest, it has been, to date, both a demonstrated success and an ongoing experiment, and these writings will those experiences.

So: I believe that in the future children can be nourished from their healthy local farms based-on what we do on our farms now.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”