Launching a Food Forest Farm School for a Regenerative Food System
By: Jehane Akiki
Tags: Regeneration, Social Change, Refugees, Agriculture, Climate Change

Farms Not Arms is a collective of designers, farmers, strategists, & agriculturalists working to build an integrated, multi-agricultural educational farm model that heals our lands, our health, and our communities. Through a human-centered and systems-focused design process, we built a highly-efficient and productive farm model that brings refugees and the local population together to target nutrition, regeneration, and social cohesion. Our first farm will be located in Beqaa, Lebanon.

This article is part 2 of a 3-part series on the food and agricultural project we have been building.

In our first article, we discussed the complex systemic environment in Lebanon and explained how refugee food security became the starting point to building a solution towards a regenerative and nourishing food system. This article goes into the social impact and systemic ramifications of our farm, which is both a food forest and an experiential school, and how it can be a starting point for a more nourishing, regenerative, and self-sufficient local food system.

Our vision

Our farm is designed to intentionally bring refugees and local Lebanese people together to cultivate nutritious food, replenish the land that they both currently find themselves on, and engage socially through educational courses, social gatherings, dinners, and the informal exchanges that are facilitated by our farm design. Our vision has the potential to use only 3% of Lebanon’s land to feed every single Lebanese and refugee present in the country.

We designed this holistic solution by placing food at the center of our 3 interconnecting main goals of nutrition, regeneration, and social cohesion to create security, opportunity, and solidarity.

We have already discussed nutrition and social cohesion by looking at the scale of food insecurity in Lebanon as well as the xenophobia and social tensions that refugees face. Before moving into the components of our solution, it’s worth having a quick primer on regeneration.

Regeneration Primer

Regeneration, by definition, is a process of renewing and restoring. In the context of agriculture, regeneration is going a step beyond sustainability (which can be seen as a zero-sum game of inputs and outputs that produce food without harming the planet) to one where you are creating a positive impact — not just ensuring you create no harm but rather restoring what has been damaged. Regenerative agriculture is rooted in improving soil health, increasing biodiversity, capturing carbon in the soil, and increasing biomass while adopting a systems-wide approach to farming. Regenerative agriculture might seem new and complex, but it is in fact rooted in ancestral, indigenous wisdom and about reincorporating that local knowledge into our relationship with the land. This requires unlearning certain long-held beliefs about agriculture that are market-driven and destructive to soil and climate, and going back to a holistic, nature-based way of farming.

Regenerative agriculture is crucial to what we are doing because it is not simply a short-sighted solution that creates a wider systemic problem. With conventional agriculture responsible for over 25% of total global greenhouse emissions, any solution that targets food security but worsens the climate crisis and destroys our planet simply exacerbates existing problems. Instead, our goal is to implement agriculture that is beneficial all around: for humans, for the land, and for the planet.

Solution Components

We seek to restore the lush, food secure past of Lebanon by combining 3 main components that are in line with the 3 pillars of nutrition, regeneration, and social cohesion:

EFFICIENT FARM PRODUCTION: building an innovative, multi-agricultural system that incorporates regenerative practices with low-tech hydroponics. Our farm design is highly efficient and produces 3.5 times the amount of food in any given area. Using regenerative agriculture, we are also enhancing the soil’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, making the soil more nutrient rich and resistant to extreme weather. Our farm design creates a food forest that maximizes yield, crop diversity, and biodiversity while minimizing waste and carbon in the air. This efficiency represents the most viable long-term solution to food insecurity. The farm will start reaping results only a few months after being set up while reaching its full potential in 4–6 years. (More technical details about our design in our third article.)

Image rendering by Bau Land

EDUCATION: Through our farm school, we will work on equipping communities both with integrated and regenerative farming skills. As an educational institution by design our farm would be running cohorts of participants that are a mix of refugees and locals who experientially learn the skills needed to build, maintain, and replicate such a hybrid and productive model. Our intention with the farm school is to turn it into a living laboratory to experiment with nature and continuously learn from the land what is needed to restore the local living ecosystems, all while documenting and sharing the findings.

Upon completion, we would link the graduates to abandoned and abundant arable lands, starting with those owned by more impoverished locals who see no value in them and are a lost asset. We present the Lebanese land owners a choice: if they are interested in keeping the food grown on their land, we offer a few cost-sharing options, like using the land in exchange for free food or labor for food. If they aren’t, we rent or buy it from them and sell the produce to market. The graduated skilled farmers that are working on the new ‘spoke’ farms also have the option of keeping produce and are paid a far wage accordingly. In the case of refugees, their new wage would be at least 5 times higher than what they get paid now. Education and skill-building are some of the most important things you can provide a refugee that will transcend borders and that can help him easily integrate and adapt anywhere.

COMMUNITY: We are using agriculture as a way to heal social divides and combat xenophobia between refugees and host communities.

Image rendering by Bau Land

Our aim is to change the narrative from one where refugees are seen as taking away resources to one where refugees are regenerating and replenishing the land. Community is key to building a strong and resilient food system in Lebanon and to achieving refugee food security. We intend to focus on how refugees can work with the host communities to improve the place they are both sharing — the land the refugees fled to as a safe haven — while ensuring that whatever we accomplish will be carried on to their home country or next destination.

Impact

Farmed Land: With conservative assumptions of 40 participants (with equal parts locals and refugees) in each yearly cohort, where half of whom build new spoke 5000m2 (1 acre) farms with our support, and if every year ½ of the participants leave and we replace them with new cohort grads, we would be establishing 10 new spoke farms every year. We project that a new central farm will sprout from each existing one every 4 years to accommodate new participants.

Given those assumptions, in a 30-year period, we will have scaled to a network of 5426 total farms: 128 are central farms of 15,000 m2 and 10,000 m2 planted and 5298 are local smallholder spoke farms of 5000 m2, all planted. Given these numbers, we would have created 27.3 km2 of regenerated food forests only through our direct action. This is on the low end as plot sizes and number of participants each year could be much higher.

Our goal, though, is not to work alone but to build a networked solution. We seek to connect with whoever is working on agriculture and food security, and collaborate with municipalities and other organizations to quickly scale this way of farming. These partners will spread our model on their lands to create tangible ripple effects that can be felt on a national level, thereby contributing to self-sufficiency. Towards that end, we have approached some of the NGOs alleviating hunger, and ones working with refugees in order to collaborate and train some of their beneficiaries.

Food Security: To further illustrate the impact we can create, our farm design is 3.5x more efficient at producing food on any given area. 10,000 m2 feeds 250 people their total diet. If Lebanon’s population is around 8 million with refugees, using our model would require 329 km2 to feed the entire Lebanese population, including refugees living on it. If we round it up to 330 km2, then just by using 3.15% of Lebanon’s area (which is 10,452 km²), we can feed every single person in Lebanon (including the refugees) their entire yearly diet.

Illustrating some of our impact in terms of food security, the typical Lebanese diet, and land use.

Climate Change: By spreading regenerative farms through both education and intentionally linking the participants to abandoned land, we would be expediting the goal of drawdown (getting to the point of reversing carbon emissions) by restoring the soil’s capacity to sequester carbon and store it instead of releasing it in the environment.

Carbon is the basis of all life on earth, yet we’ve been releasing it in the atmosphere instead of putting back into the natural system the way it’s meant to be. Revamping our food systems allows us to set the carbon cycle back on track and reverse the climate effects on the planet. Such an investment in building food forests would restore biodiversity across the country and increase trees, contributing to cleaner air, water, and better health. When these changes become tangible, it will unleash a stronger commitment to preservation as people will be able to see the changes in their quality of life.

Lebanon right now is at a crucial crossroads, making it the best time for it to embark on a total regeneration, starting with its food system. By starting in one area you can affect the microclimate, and by creating connections across the country, macro-climates can be affected to result in a considerable reversal of climate emissions. In order to achieve that, community, collaboration, and connection are key.

Social Cohesion: Developing a food system that would feed the host community and refugees their full diets by using just over 3% of the land area is key to building social cohesion and changing the xenophobic tendencies towards refugees. Regenerative agriculture is rooted in abundance and can help with the shift away from scarcity. By rooting the project in inclusion from the start, we are paving the way for an abundance mindset where there is enough — and excess — for everyone.

In our farm design, we intentionally created a variety of informal spaces of gathering and exchange. Bringing local organizations targeting food insecurity together with refugees will help people realize the commonalities of the problems they face, and reduce the ‘othering’ that is prevalent. 500,000 Syrians were already seasonal agricultural workers in Lebanon before the war; we are not wildly changing the existing system, but enhancing it to make it more inclusive, equitable, and efficient. These kinds of social tensions faced by refugees in Lebanon, though not as extreme, are faced by most migrants and refugees when they settle in a new country. We aim to create a model where refugees can bring benefits to any community they settle in while building healthy relationships with the host.

CONCLUSION

Our project bridges divides — between refugees and host communities & between ancestral wisdom and technological innovation — to build an optimal agricultural model that provides long-term solutions towards food insecurity, climate change, and social cohesion. The heart of this vision is centered on experiential education that can quickly scale impact for both participants and the community at large.

We started building out this model in Lebanon because it is rife with deep systemic problems and has the highest percentage of refugees in the world. Our ultimate goal, though, is to reach underserved communities around the world with an efficient and scalable food model that can be tailored to different localities using a mix of human-centric design and local, community-driven knowledge. We need to begin locally to ensure that each area on Earth is nourished, full of life, and thriving in order to restore abundance and our shared humanity through agriculture.

We see fertile ground for Farms Not Arms to accelerate change by drawing on integrated and efficient farm design, a local ecosystem of partnerships, and the inherent strengths of refugee and local communities. Combining the above would build the foundation for a new food system to emerge — one that works for everyone, and for the planet — by healing the country starting with the soil and the food that grows in it.

Our vision is reaffirmed by the emerging popularity of sustainable agriculture. Locals have already started informally planting (what we call guerrilla agriculture) and launched campaigns to promote sustainable agriculture at scale. More and more politicians are championing agriculture, though many are using wrong techniques, and the message feels loud and clear that the Lebanese crisis is not going away without targeting food self-sufficiency. We wish to take it a step further and turn it into a regenerative revolution, starting with the food insecurity problem to instigate the rebirth of a green nation.

Note: Farms Not Arms received special mention as a semi-finalist in the Food System Vision Prize and was awarded $25,000 by The Rockefeller Foundation for designing an inspiring vision for a nourishing and regenerative food system by 2050.