Avena+ Test Bed: Agricultural Printing and Altered Landscapes

Avena+ Test Bed explores the relationship between landscape, agriculture and digital fabrication.

With the advent of Precision Farming, agriculture has become fully mapped and will transform farming to a highly digital activity. This in combination with other changes underway in the countryside, mainly the paradigm shift from food to biogas production and various EU subsidy schemes to promote diversity, will lead to disruptive changes within the next few years for the (European) countryside.

The project uses the idea of “Agricultural Printing” to explore the possibilities of digital fabrication carried over into farming. The experiment applies algorithms to partition and to create an environmentally beneficial structure into a standard biomass/energy production field. These additional areas establish, or improve, the connectivity for fauna and flora between habitats. This increased diversity also eases typical problems of monocultures e.g. less vermin → reduced usage of pesticides. Furthermore a farmer could “rent out” the areas for several months a year as compensatory area in the same fashion like the CO2 emissions trading scheme works (in the EU every new land for building has to be compensated). Hence in the near future a farmer might not just produce oats, peas, beans, and barley, but also print “environment compensations areas” into his fields.

Final "Agricultural Printing" pattern

Plant pixel map as printed to the field

The overall aim of the project is to look into the potential these changes (already underway), especially in terms of design opportunities. The emphasis lays in speculating about new models which would enhance current agricultural practices, and to then imagine their possible implications.

End of July 2013 the test bed was harvested for producing biogas.

Plants

85% oats (Avena Sativa)

15% eleven different flowers and herbs

Dimensions

11.5 hectares (320 m x 920 m) in Unterwaldhausen, South Germany

Printing with seed