Interweaving The Valley

Land tenure reveals resource injustices. The distribution of farming resources is significantly unbalanced between farms.

Artificial nitrogen fertilizers are over used and have caused severe environmental problems. With intercropping strategies and precision agriculture, this project seeks to put land nutrition into balance and make use of the natural process of fertilizing. It looks at ways in which the agriculture can give the environment relief and simultaneously allow for increase in biodiversity and a turn toward equity.

This project sits deeply within social structures surrounding the practice of farming. We are committed to enhancing social equity within the agricultural context in California Central Valley. We believe that low-income workers ought to have adequate living support. Minority farmers, including the Hmong people who have been somehow regionally and socially isolated, can become an integrated part of the farm landscape.

As landscape architects, we are seeking for ways to help the minorities to amplify their skills while balancing the profit between tenants and landowners. This program is also aiming at reducing environmental impact in farming practice and improve living and working environment for farmers. With new farm pattern, the landscape will change the existing large farm patches, thus helps increase biodiversity.

Combining housing, small-scale and large-scale farmlands, we are creating suburban communities to fulfill the needs of different farmers and farming methods. By inserting small scale legume croplands into large scale farms to form a new growth pattern, chemical fertilizers can be reduced and land nutrients are balanced organically, which leads to a healthier environment. Also, intercropping helps increase local biodiversity, bringing back to the days when the central valley is still forest. Farmland-based housing can also be a seasonal program. It provides temporary accommodation for farmers during sowing and harvesting seasons, while serving other functions in the rest of the year, such as education and tourism.

We believe that intercropping enhanced by precise machine tools can generate a new opportunity of balance. Collaborating with large property owners, this mode benefits the minorities not only in physical substances but also in farming methods and resource justice.