Vaissnavi Shukl
A few months before the COVID lockdowns began in 2020, Rem Koolhaas’ much awaited exhibition Countryside opened in The Guggenheim museum in New York. Bumped that I could not make it to the exhibition, I ordered a copy of ‘Countryside Report’,  the small but thick pocket sized handbook with essays from collaborators of the project. It was in this book that I first came across Lenora Ditzler’s essay on pixel farming; this very innovative method of farming that questions the widespread monoculture and shows us a new way of looking at agriculture by dividing a farm into smaller pixels. What’s more, it proposes to do so with eco-feminist robots.
I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

So usually when I would start an interview, I would start with a very elaborate prelude on, ‘let me start off with this question’. And I’ve read so much about your work. And of course we have. But this… this wonderful book, where I read your essay for the first time, and then we were on this zoom call together about two years back, you probably don’t remember me from then. But we spoke about your work then and now we are here. So I have a lot of questions. But my first question is very simple. Why farming? What led you to study farming of everything you could do in the world? Not that I promote studying architecture. But why? Farming sciences? Agricultural Sciences?

Lenora Ditzler
Yes. Well, it’s a good question. And I don’t think my answer will be super direct. But I can give you the kind of winding road that took me here, which I think starts in high school. Well, let’s be honest, I think probably earlier, it starts earlier, because I grew up in a household where food was really important. And our meals together, getting together to sit around the table and have nice meals was really central to how we connected as a family and also how we connected to friends and community. So that’s an important food piece that was always there. And then in high school, I had the opportunity to take a course. I grew up in San Francisco and California, and went to a kind of, let’s say, non traditional high school where as a senior, you had this chance to take a course, where we all got in a little yellow school bus van and drove around the state of California for six weeks studying a topic in the field. And every year the topic changed. And it just happened that the year I was a senior, taking this course the topic was food and agriculture. So we drove around with a whole bunch of bicycles and tents stuffed in the van, and visited farmers all over the state for six weeks, and just spent a lot of time standing around in fields talking to farmers, trying to understand what challenges they were dealing with what food production looked like and meant in California. Of course, the whole central valley of California is the biggest producer of fresh fruits and vegetables for the whole US. So it’s a really important agricultural hub. And there was no real like, research question or agenda, it was mostly just to try to understand what was happening and what challenges people were dealing with. So it’s a very open, loose introduction to what farming looked like. And we went to everything from massive industrial fields, selling to nationwide distribution centres, to really tiny one hectare family farms, where they were growing 30 different things. So the whole range of what was out there. And I think that’s where the seed was planted to use a dumb farming metaphor. But yeah, then it took a long time to come back to actually studying agriculture, seriously. I had a roundabout way of getting to academia. I studied actually Visual Art and Environmental Sciences in college as a bachelor. And then went on to do a bunch of sort of arts related things and tried to make a living, doing seasonal work and going to arts residencies post college, and eventually landed a job as a science teacher at an art school for high school students in California. And when I got there, there was no curriculum for the science class, they just said, do whatever you want. So I said, Okay, let’s make a big garden and let’s make our science curriculum, all about farming and food. And there was really nice resources available in California to do that kind of thing. There’s a lot of sort of the Edible Schoolyard Movement was really big at that time. But all of those curricula focused on smaller kids like elementary school students, fourth, fifth graders kind of thing. And I wanted to try to make a curriculum that had similar principles, but for high school students. So like honours level, environmental sciences, basically. So I started doing it and like made all these programmes and curriculums and started a huge garden. We got bees and chickens and all kinds of stuff. And it was fantastic, but I sort of reached a level of not being able to push my curriculum farther without studying more myself. And then that’s when I went back to get a master degree.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Look where that got us.

Lenora Ditzler
And then, yeah, then I got stuck in academia, which brought me back to the arts, as you showed with that little book. So that’s my…my long story.

Vaissnavi Shukl
No, but it’s very interesting. I mean, I didn’t know, of course, how you got here. But it it, of course, isn’t the case where you know, you grew up on a ranch or you know, your parents were farmers. None of that is because a particular high school as a part of their pedagogy, thought it was important for people to know where their food comes from, and so that it is kind of this self initiated project, which, I know you have a background in arts and we’ll get to pixel farming, because I have a lot of questions. But it’s very evident. Now knowing that background, the work that you’re currently doing, has that bit of a creative process or a creative inclination towards even thinking about farming from a very different perspective. So…so let’s jump into that great. The reason I were talking right now is because I came across your work in Rem Koolhaas’ exhibition called the Countryside, which was supposed to launch maybe a few weeks after the COVID lockdown actually happened, right? So it yeah, or it had launched a few weeks before the COVID lockdown. Before?

Lenora Ditzler
Yes, it was almost exactly three weeks before New York, locked to shut down. Yeah, yeah. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
So this was… this was in the Guggenheim. And it was this really large multi-year project where a couple of studios that REM had even conducted in the Graduate School of Design where I went to grad school. So there, it had been something that was in processing multiple years. And it was not just multifaceted, but also like geographically very diverse, because there were urban planners and designers from Africa talking about something and then there were people from the Netherlands talking about something and then there was of course, you know, collective of farmers from the rest bed from like, bang in the middle of America, talking about cooperatives. So, so it really spanned like geographically across the world, quite literally. And when I… when I read your essay, which I thought was very fantastically written, because it didn’t have that Academy tone, it had almost like arts essay, kind of a turn towards talking about something that’s very scientific. And this is our cue to jump into pixel farming. So tell me more about pixel farming, all pixel cropping? I mean, of course, I’ve read about it. It’s…it’s a new way of looking at farming, okay, this is… this is my version, where you divide the farmland into smaller pixels, here comes the arts training. And you’ve devised a way where you can grow a bunch of different crops together in a way that you don’t use as many fertilisers that you keep the soil health in tight, but you’re also able to produce more. And there’s a little bit of maths going into it, a little bit of automation and technology going into it. And when you look at the diagram of the pixel farm, there’s a lot of art going into it as well. Yes, so handhold us and lead us to how that happened.

Lenora Ditzler
Well, that was a fantastic summary. So I think you’ve grasped the idea. Well, the main inspiration for pixel cropping was a train of thought, kind of reasoning, logic, that the biggest problems coming from agriculture, can all be related back to the monoculture way of doing intensive crop farming. That’s the norm in industrialised parts of the world. So in where I am now in Western Europe, or in the US especially, and so all the big, ecological and many of the social issues that we have with agriculture, but our project really focuses on the ecological issues come from this style of doing things on a huge scale and just planting giant fields of the same thing, often genetically identical versions of the same crop. And the logic is that if we are going to remedy the problems that come from that mono linear system, then you have to break up farm fields into smaller units and grow many more diverse kinds of things. So that’s just sort of the very simple one to one flip that the opposite of monoculture is a polyculture. And the question is how to do that kind of complicated, diverse polyculture farming in an industrialised setting where intensive input use on giant machines and large scales are the norm. So the research project that pixel farming came out of took that premise, and then came up with a range of ways that we could basically split the industrial crop field into smaller units and then diversify. So it’s a very geometric kind of orthogonal approach to decision as which is appropriate for being in the Netherlands. Yeah, so one of the sort of intermediary methods that we’re testing was strip cropping, which is self explanatory, you cut the field into long, narrow strips, and then plant different things. And you treat each strip as a small field. And then pixel cropping takes that one step further and cuts the field in the other direction. So you end up with a patchwork of small squares, which can each be treated as their own field. And the hypothesis was that if you do this, the smaller and smaller your field unit gets, then the more ecological benefits you should have, and the more yield you should have. There’s a bunch of agronomic studies that show that more intimate mixing of crops, so things like planting corn and soy or wheat and fava beans, the closer those different species mingle, the more the benefit. So we took that logic and said, okay, then we want the smallest pixels we can manage, and then we should get the most benefit. So it was this very, kind of yeah, constructed mathematical Cartesian approach to just let’s see how you can remedy the monoculture, but in an industrialised setting.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Now there’s a bunch of things in this method that I thought were kind of fabulous, because come to think of it… it’s in… its very basis, like the crux of it is, this is a practice that has been in action farmers have been doing it since decades, right? So it’s yeah, it’s not like you’re gonna go out and say, the world is flat. You know, it’s it’s everybody accepts the fact that traditionally, farmers used to have heterogeneous farmland where they would either switch crops based on season or they would always have two or three crops growing together. And in your work, you of course, talk about the three sister or milpa and somebody else in this season as well, she’s, she’s from Mexico, and she’s written a thesis on it’s called Chasing Milpa , where she talks about how it’s quite an indigenous practice in Mexico to to plant corn, beans and squash together, right. So it’s… it’s something that people have been doing all along. But I think what was really interesting was that you’re talking about scaling this practice, in a way where you don’t really have to trade off a heterogeneous farmland for a monoculture. It’s almost like every time we switch scales, we are losing parts of these traditional farming practices at every notch. So one would, of course, be in terms of the things that we grow. So we would lose out a couple of crops that we would have otherwise planted together in favour of one farmer, for example, you would lose out on your organic fertilisers or natural your ecosystems to fertilise the field or have certain kinds of pests or insects, you know, without the crops because you’re using chemical fertilisers. And then of course, everything is automated so you’re not able to micromanage it. I mean, at the seed level writer, Vandana Shiva talks about this a lot. And she talks about how we’ve traded all of this for like GMOs or genetically modified organisms where we’ve reduced the kind of crop that we grow because we just like seeds are patented. But in terms of pixel farming, and of course, I mean, you’re coming from an academic perspective and you’ve done a lot of experiments on this and you had some very nice insights into how it actually works on crown. Tell us about all the processes that are involved when you when one starts farming and how those would differ from say, like monoculture with like, you just grow wheat versus pigs and farming. How would those processes differ between the two?

Lenora Ditzler
I think the… the main difference is just the level of efficiency that you can achieve in a large scale monoculture compared to a pixel crop. But then the caveat is how you define efficient or productive. So we’ve come to understand efficiency and productivity, as it relates to monocultures, as being a system where it requires a little amount of human labour. And that you get out of it a lot of product and that’s really only harvestable product. So in the case of a wheat field, we only calculate the amount of grain that comes from that field. And that’s our understanding of what productivity and efficiency means in that kind of farming. But in a polyculture, like, three sisters milpa situation, or this kind of industrial Frankenstein version of pixel farming in the Netherlands, the those measures of efficiency and productivity aren’t that relevant anymore, because there’s so many more things that are coming in and out of the system, it’s not a simple linear system anymore. So everything gets more complicated from sowing the field. Instead of just driving a giant tractor around all day, to plant your wheat field, you have to manage individual patches of land differently and probably plant things at different times of the season or of the year. And each thing requires a different approach to how you care for the crop. So then throughout the season, each, each crop also requires a different amount of time, different tools, different skills and knowledge of how to care for it. And everything just sort of gets exponentially more complex and also tends to be more time consuming, partially because of this machine issue. So when you have a wheat fields are tractors are made to be able to manage many, many hectares in a day, no problem for one farmer sitting on a tractor. But when you have something that’s much more intricately complex in the field, like pixels or other polycultures, then you probably need hands-on labour, because we don’t have machines that can manage those kinds of systems yet. And that just takes a lot more time and a lot more people. So depending on how you look at it, you could say it’s a burden that there’s so many other complexities and different kinds of knowledge is required. Or you can look at it as a benefit that it actually invites this kind of more community approach to doing farming or more diverse knowledge and skills and, and then the theory is that you get a lot more out of it. So in a monoculture at the end of the season, you make one pest with your tractor, and you harvest the one thing that you grew, and in a pixel plot or a forest garden or whatever, then you get to harvest many different things. And ideally, there’s also other ecosystem properties that you’re not harvesting. So biodiversity is maybe flourishing on your farm, soil life is building and growing. People might enjoy seeing your farm when they cycle past it, all these other kinds of ecological and cultural services that you don’t get from a mono linear monoculture.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think two things that I was thinking about when I was, you know, thinking to myself, you know, what is the difference? I mean, you mentioned most of the cons right now, but in terms of the pros, the factor of time, not just in terms of the time for a plantation and harvesting, but the time that the plants themselves would take to create like a mini ecosystem in that little pixel is almost representative of what it would have been otherwise as well without any human intervention, so to saying because I think again, it’s in your work, you said during your PhD research, you had all these different forums through which you would talk to people from different farming traditions. And I think you asked them what, what they meant by ecosystem or agro ecosystem, and somebody said, it’s nothing fancy, it’s just things that would have otherwise be found in nature coexisting together. Anyway, and one of the images that that you put in the Countryside Essay is the pixel farm right next to the strip farm, kind of shows that right you have the strip farm which is which seems more Cartesian then then your big farm, but when you look at the pixel farm, it seems like there has been no, no human intervention at all. It just seems like it’s meant to be organic. But I do get your point about the care they would require because every… it’s… it’s like living in a diverse, socially diverse, racially diverse society where everybody has different needs and wants. And there enters the robots that you also got to work with and prototype. Now, when you were prototyping the robots, you worked with farmers, and you were trying to figure out at what stage would these robots be required? If at all, would they be required? I mean, some said they would be required at the stage of sowing because that’s very intensive, one person said that he would really want them for weeding and then but one person said that he would rather read his farm himself. But how, where did the idea of robots come in? Did it come purely from the angle of making this viable at an industrial scale? Or was there more to do having this automation approach?

Lenora Ditzler
Yeah. First, I want to come back to something you said just two thoughts ago about the difference between the nice orderly strips and the wild looking pixel because I this is one of my favourite things about pixel farming is this tension between the very orderly grid of what it looks like on a map and this kind of Cartesian? Yeah, yeah, like, we’re just gonna cut the field smaller and smaller, and then we’ll have smaller and smaller management units. And then if it gets small enough, maybe it’ll look like nature again. So that’s one of the things I like about it is this sort of bizarre way of approaching creating a farming system that’s supposed to look and act like nature, but also with this? I feel very Dutch, orderly, straight lined methodology. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s inherently contradictory, don’t you think? Because if you didn’t know, these were plants growing on the pixels, if you just look at the map of the pixels, it’s extremely like mechanised, looks very technological. It looks very artsy. You know, even, but then when you… when you see the plants growing on that pixels, there’s almost no no semblance of the fact that they were planted, or the geometric pattern at you can tell this was… this was a pixel crop.

Lenora Ditzler
No, especially like, we have those little blue field steaks with white flags that mark the pixels. And that’s really the only way you can tell where the… the plots are. But so I think, actually, that’s a good segue into Where did robots come from? Because on the one hand, pixel farming is this seems to be this very controllable mech ignite mechanised double approach to just making your management units smaller. So in that sense, it would make sense that you would just need smaller and smaller machines, right. So if you, your big field needs a giant tractor, then your pixel field needs a tiny tractor or something. And then the way machine development is going in agriculture as things get bigger and bigger. And that’s been the trend, especially with fossil fuel driven machines, which is what most of agriculture has done with bigger and heavier machines. So the one trend that’s going opposite of that is the automation trend. And there’s big push in agriculture right now, coming from kind of economics and labour standpoint, that robots are going to be the future of farming, and that we should replace all these giant heavy tractors which are bad for the soil, and need a lot of humans to manage them. And we should replace them with these small autonomous machines that are going to be lightweight and not damage the soil so much. And they can work on their own all night long with no humans having to do anything. So there’s this already this move in agriculture, in some sense towards smaller machines. And it just makes sense that if you make your field smaller than a smaller machine could be viable. And then the ones that are being developed are these automated robotic kind of machines. But the other issue is, like you said, it looks super wild and crazy, actually growing in the field because everything is so close together, you end up with a whole new set of requirements for what a machine would have to do to be able to manage a sort of natural field like that. And again, then robots come in as a kind of logical response because things like machine learning and sensing technologies are advancing really quickly. And there’s potential there for those technologies to be able to manage, or to… to be able to handle the complexity of something like a pixel field. Whereas a very mechanical kind of tractor implement that sort of locks into place and then does the same thing continuously wouldn’t make sense in a pixel farm. So with these developments happening, and recognising that we probably needed some sort of smaller tools to do pixel farming, we started questioning whether robotics could be a good option to make pixel farming viable. And it definitely came from the perspective of thinking of pixel farming as a replacement for large scale industrial monocultures. So like if you were going to get rid of that 50 hectare field of potatoes and replace it with one metre pixels? Could a robot do that job? Because there’s just no way in a place like the Netherlands where everything is mechanised, with big machines, you know, there’s one person driving that tractor, it’s not like there’s already a community of 50 people working the farm field. The only way to make pixel farming work on that scale would be to have some tools, or a whole new labour structure. But a lot of our work happened, like right at the start and the peak of COVID. And there was a lot of, like, in other places in the world shortage of farm labour, because many farm labourers across borders. We lost a large portion of the… the migrant farm workers that would normally come to the Netherlands and help with jobs like weeding or harvesting crops that you can’t manage with, with machines. So there started to be a lot more discussion about automation. And supposedly, a bunch of new investment and funding went into farm robots. And there were a lot of news stories about how robots are going to take over and solve the labour problems of crises like COVID, or migration issues or political problems. And yeah, so the discussion of robots was also just happening around us a lot. And it would come up frequently as the suppose its solution to how to do pixel farming at scale. So we started asking if… if it would be possible and looking at whether farmers would actually like to use robots and whether there were any robots being developed that were anywhere close to being ready to use on a farm? And what exactly would a pixel farming robot have to do to be able to work?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, that was…that was exactly what I was going for, because it’s not like this industry is devoid of any kind of automation or mechanisation. I mean, I think if you think about technological changes and development, probably agriculture is like the single most industry where it seems so much of development in terms of tractors and instruments and equipments and everything, you know, right from like sowing to harvesting to storage even I mean, I’m trying to get somebody on the season, who’s written a lot about how development in the construction industry really helped the agricultural industry because construction materials that were being developed like alternately in the world were being used to make grain silos to store grain so so anything that was happening in the world outside had an application in the agricultural industry. I think the only from a very simplistic viewpoint, the only addition the robot would bring in, which is like a large addition, is the factor of intelligence, right? Because a lot of these things are already mechanised, but they need human supervision. The robot will probably bring artificial intelligence which would help itself do certain things. But my question is, the robot might be able to do weeding, sowing harvesting, in terms of the infrastructure of care, because you you do speak a lot about the relationship that a farmer has with his with his farmland or the community has as a collaborative with what they’re growing even plants with each other with the insects with the bugs and even South Asian student who told you that the dogs come in without their plants. What aspects of care would you hypothetically relegate to a robot and what you would certainly keep away from it because it seems like when you get into robotics and automation or artificial intelligence like opening a can of worms, you know, once it’s out it’s… it’s out there’s there’s no stopping it.

Lenora Ditzler
Yeah, this is a huge question. And especially because I think in the robotics, narratives, and particularly farming, robotics, the element of care doesn’t seem to be present. There are these kind of well known headlines from The Guardian newspaper, they write a lot about farming robotics for some reason. And there was one a couple years ago that was announcing the rise of the robot farmer will have space bots with lasers zapping plants. And then there was another one about a weeding robot that was going to murder weeds with an electric bolt. That’s sort of dystopian, totally. And the the language of these articles and these headlines is very much about a dominant sort of violent approach to doing farming, which is all about eliminating everything that’s not your crop. And that whether that’s a pest or a weed, or whatever. So that’s the kind of narrative that’s happening in robotics and a lot of robotics. And switching that to an element of care is quite radical. But I think it’s necessary to think about robotics in that way, if we’re going to apply them to these agro ecological complicated systems like pixel farming, Because in a system like that, you want things to interact and intermingle, and you want nature to find a balance. So that means not just eliminating every pest, but rather creating an environment where the pests are not getting out of control, because there’s also a natural enemy of that pest present and that there’s a natural balance that arrives. So there are some pests, but it doesn’t cause a huge problem, because there’s also the enemies of that pest and they control each other. Similarly, for weeds, or diseases, or anything else that we see in agriculture normally as a big problem that has to be gotten rid of. So in order to manage a system in that way, where you’re not just looking at it as a binary either or like good, bad weed crop, pest enemy, you need a more nuanced approach to seeing difference and balance and symbiosis and, and connectivity between elements. And I think the way to do that…then is to think of it as a system that you’re nurturing or caring for, rather than one that you’re trying to strictly control and eliminate. But how to build that into a tool of any kind, especially an automated robotic tool is still a huge open question that I don’t have a good answer to. And maybe it’s not possible, which is also an answer.

Vaissnavi Shukl
What do you think? Okay, let me rephrase this. I was… I thought this would be simpler. This question, because I don’t have anything written today. I’m gonna try to wing it as best as I can. What do you think this hypothetical robot were to exist? How do you think it would differ from this robot who zaps and murders weed? Now what I’m going towards is in your essay, you call these robots,  ecofeminist robots, right? Of course, maybe at the end of the day, their functions might be similar, you know, they weed out best they blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The harvest is so but why an eco feminist robot there’s a whole discourse on this but never really related to a robot of all, you know, nouns that come after ecofeminism. I never thought there would be a robot that would be an eco feminist robot. 

Lenora Ditzler
Yeah, well, I still… I still wonder if there… is if there will ever be such a robot. But yeah, the… the idea for the ecofeminist robot came out of this kind of problem of trying to match the current narratives. In agricultural robots and the needs both ecological and community wise, of more diverse farming systems, non monocultures of any kind. And one thing that happened to me a lot at the beginning of my PhD when I was starting to study pixel cropping was that I would tell people what it was about and show them the field and they would say, Okay, but how are you going to do the labour this is not possible this is unrealistic, why are you even bothering? And I would say, Well, I heard that there’s going to be a cool new robot, and maybe it could do the work for us. My supervisor had told me that there was going to there were robotics being developed very quickly, and that maybe that would solve the labour problem. And as soon as I said the word robot in the context of this sort of organic, holistic approach to farming people, I got a lot of pushback, people got really upset sometimes, like why would you introduce automation, and data driven technologies in an agro ecological context? That’s totally anti ecology. It’s anti farmers.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So it’s almost like they are mutually exclusive. And for them, they could never really coexist.

Lenora Ditzler
Exactly. So there’s a sort of polarised vision between the monoculture world of robotics and then the agro ecological world of farming and they don’t really seem to match up. Because agro ecology is all about food sovereignty, which I think you spoke about in the last episode, community and being situated and local finding local solutions and connections between people and plants. And foods and traditions and ecologies. Social justice and autonomy of farmers and a lot of what’s coming out of this sort of agriculture 4.0 technology data driven future that’s being pushed on farmers is the exact opposite. Like all this data is being harvested that’s being taken away from farmers and they have no autonomy or ownership or farmers can’t even fix their own tractors are not allowed to because of, yeah, laws coming from the autonomous tractor companies, things like that. So there’s an obvious disconnect. So then, yeah, when… when… when we were having these conversations, I started asking people, well, okay, fine. So currently, robotics and agro ecology don’t seem to be compatible. But is there any scenario under which they could be compatible? Could you imagine a robot that would work for agro ecology and the way people started describing what agroecology meant to them? And what a robot would need to do just started triggering this sort of recognition that oh, this sounds a lot like ecofeminism. And my colleagues who have been doing a lot of this work with Clayman Streisand, who wrote the rock robot paper within was also part of the countryside exhibition. He’s a cultural geographer and a philosopher and has looked a lot at the relationship between farmers and cows and robotics. So milking machines as a new technology entering or entering farming and how that changes farmers relationships with their cows in their farming practices. So he entered the dialogue and we started talking, he threw out this idea that this all sounded a lot like ecofeminism and we started investigating it and reading and talking and testing the idea with different people. And I would say that it’s still very much an open can of worms because it raises also probably even more kind of emotional and critical response to say that we want an ecofeminist robot than to say an agro ecological robot. But what we’re trying to do now is kind of break down more concretely what the so called demands of an ecofeminist robot for pixel farming or any kind of farming could be and so to try to narrow in on what the core characteristics and values could be, so in some way a lot a lot of that is still drawn from the sort of original ecofeminist thinkers, the people working a lot in the 90s, this sort of California wave of, of ecofeminism of the early 90s, which is a lot about getting rid of binaries and dualisms and bringing in an element of care and connecting a sense of being well being and identity to the land and yeah, those those types of things. But then also bringing in more contemporary approaches to… to the way humans relate. to nature, and each other and machines. So looking more at the materialist studies and scholars, a lot of more than human philosophical approaches are looking at these kinds of questions. So we’re now trying to expand out of the sort of original eco feminist box and look at it more. Yeah, as a way of capturing the ethos of farming in a farming machine. And then what… what would you need to do to make that happen?

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s not a fascinating almost seems like it’s Utopia being realised at like an arm’s length because you, you read about stuff, you know, and in, in lots of ways it sounds like it’s too good to be true, but probably not, you know, probably it is possible and maybe in the near future, we we will see ecofeminist robots on our on our fields and for the good, I think right.

Lenora Ditzler
But maybe it is too good to be true. I think we have to leave that open as a possibility at least currently. But maybe robots are just not the answer. I think maybe you… you saw we did this project with a group of design students in our journey through farming robotics. We asked a bunch of different groups of people to make a prototype pixel farming robot with this list of sort of ecofeminist demands. And one group of engineers drew a very traditional looking robot fine, that… that’s what they came up with. And we presented the same challenge to a group of design students and they didn’t know much about farming at all, and they completely rejected the idea of a robot. They just said no way. Why would we make a robot? What’s the point that the farmer to do this kind of farming just needs a simple hand tool that’s ergonomically designed that’s going to make her job comfortable every day. So what do you even need a robot for the farmer has the knowledge, the care, the ability to see the difference between two different weeds? Like why bother with this complicated technology? So that I think that’s also a valid approach or the… the farmer in Indonesia has ducks for her? Yeah, so those are also options.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So where are we with the research? What are you working on? What’s next? And how’s pixel farming coming along?

Lenora Ditzler
Pixel farming is, I think, maybe in its current form, coming to its natural end, at least in our country. So we’ve been doing the field experiment for five years now. And in one more season, it will have completed its full rotation cycle. So I think at that point, we’re going to stop collecting data. And I don’t know what’s going to happen will hopefully have some sort of ceremony where we plough it under and say goodbye, hopefully with good coffee. Yeah, definitely. That version of the experiment, I think is coming to an end soon, but there’s a lot of discussion about what could be a next version, something more practical. Taking what we’ve learned from these last years and trying to design something looks different. There are a few offshoots that have started to sprung up, which makes me super excited. There was the farmer here in the Netherlands who tried pixel farming for a couple of years. And there’s now a farm in Switzerland. That’s doing an experiment with pixel farming, they just started last summer. I’m hoping that it’ll sort of, you know, grow naturally that people will pick up the idea and test it and modify it and make it their own, in other places. But what I’m personally looking at next is not so much taking pixel cropping in as it has existed, but this sort of general idea of complex futuristic farming systems and relationships between knowledge and complexity and technologies in these future farming systems, and sort of upscaling that at a more conceptual level. I just started a position as a researcher in a network of farms called the Global Network of Lighthouse Farms. Which is a research network of farms that are doing something super innovative in regards to sustainability and connected to their communities in really novel and exciting ways. And there’s 12 farms around the world and they’re part of this network where they… they meet and talk and learn. from each other. And then we also send master students there to do studies based on research questions developed in collaboration with the farmers themselves, and there’s a huge variety of innovations and ways that they’re dealing with sustainability. So I think my first task in that network has to get a grip on what’s happening with these themes of complexity and technology and, and innovation and how farmers are thinking about the future and figure out how to do some sort of cross site which I haven’t landed on what the research question will be, but it’ll be taking all the ideas of pixel farming and then upscaling it to a bunch of different complicated, innovative farming systems around the world.

Vaissnavi Shukl
If you were to go back and teach those art students like you did before undertaking this large project. How would you do it differently now?

Lenora Ditzler
That high school students in California you mean my… my art school job? I think I would do everything different. I’ve just learned so much about what’s possible in farming. What we were doing previously was growing a kind of small garden of vegetables, and we produced eggs and things that we sent to the kitchen, the dining hall for the students to eat for their meals, and I had made these little assignments for them to do in the garden that were sort of science assignments. But as I said, a lot of it was based on curriculum that I got from fourth and fifth graders. So I tried to scale up the… the depth of learning to the appropriate age group. But I think now I would I would go the other way around and sort of take what I’ve been doing at a academic university level and then bring that to a high school audience because I think actually, there’s capable of so much more complex thinking than what I was capable of at that time because I hadn’t really studied or delved into it, as much as I have now. So I have a tonne of ideas for how I could rewrite a high school science curriculum. Yeah, and also how to bring art more into the equation.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, this was a pleasure. Dr. Lenora Ditzler, thank you so much. Well, I wish your day is full of good coffee and stay in touch. 

Lenora Ditzler
Stay in touch. Thanks very much. That was really great. Nice talking to you. And thanks for having me.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.