Rogier Schulte of Wageningen University introduces the Lighthouse Farms project, which brings together 11 farms from around the world that are meeting 2050 sustainability goals.
When designing early maps of the world, the first cartographers wrote “Hic sunt dracones” on the fringes of their maps, meaning “here be dragons” – this is as far as our knowledge extends.
Today, the world needs new solutions to old challenges.
How can we sustain the essential service of food production within the resources of our planet in such a way that it can absorb biological, financial or climate shocks? The majority of farmers that I have worked with over the last 20 years are proud custodians of the countryside but are grappling with the competing demands for environmental and economic sustainability.
For these farmers, how can we circumnavigate today’s dragons and chart a path towards a future that is sustainable in the widest sense of the word?
At the Farming System Ecology group of Wageningen University and Research, we set sail to explore the world in search of Lighthouse Farms.
These are farms in the “new reality” that are already operating as if they are in the year 2050.
They have somehow escaped the pragmatic constraints that most farmers find themselves in and have found new ways to make sustainability the engine, rather than the constraint, for profitability.
We find them where we least expect them or where we weren’t necessarily looking. Beside a busy motorway in the Netherlands. In the deserted inlands of Spain. In the middle of urban Havana. And in the moon-like landscapes of northern Ethiopia.
An agro-forestry system in Brazil. It takes a village to manage a successional agro-forestry farm. In areas with high unemployment, this is seen as a welcome development.
Sometimes they stand out, visually, in the landscape, while others blend in, like any other farm.
Across the continents, we have brought 11 of the finest exemplars together in our global network of Lighthouse Farms.
Welcome to Latvia
Last year, we made our second visit to our Lighthouse Farm in Latvia, AS Ziedi JP. Driving the unpaved road, the forest opens up to large fields and a collection of large industrially sized buildings. Not quite the arcadia where you’d take your family on a camping trip, but inside these buildings the Pilvere family has redefined what we know as circular agriculture.
The Pilvere family has cleverly combined 1,000 dairy cows, six anaerobic digesters, two industrial generators and dozens of fish tanks so that the farm produces milk, meat, electricity, fish fillets and caviar.
What is the main product of this farm and what is the byproduct? That depends on your interest. Economically, this is a caviar farm powered by the heat from the regenerator that runs on methane belched out by the dairy cows.
There are contrasting approaches to sustainability that have similar ingredients brought together using different recipes that depend on the environments and societies that farms find themselves in
From an energy perspective, this farm is a power station that happens to produce food on the side. If our interest is in biomass flows, then this farm is a dairy farm with a diversity of additional end-products.
What makes AS Ziedi JP a Lighthouse Farm is that it has redefined the concept of circularity. It has moved beyond the concept of “recycling byproducts”. In fact, it makes the distinction between “main product” and “byproduct” irrelevant.
Redefining sustainability
Circularity, or circular agriculture, is merely one of many dimensions of sustainability. Others include climate-smart agriculture, nature-inclusive farming, agro-ecology, regenerative agriculture, conservation agriculture and community-supported agriculture.
There are contrasting approaches to sustainability that have similar ingredients brought together using different recipes that depend on the environments and societies that farms find themselves in. Irish agriculture is shaped by ruminants so it is no surprise that the climate dimension takes centre stage in the national discussion on sustainability.
Nor is it surprising that Dutch agriculture, with its large manure surplus, focuses on circularity. Or that the focus further south in the Mediterranean region threatened by land degradation is on regenerative agriculture.
We have carefully brought together our network of Lighthouse Farms so that each radically redefines at least one of these dimensions of sustainability.
Ympäristöystävällisimpänä
Take the Knehtilän cereal farm in Palopuro in southern Finland. As we turn into the yard on a visit to the farm our host Kari Koppelmäki fills his car with biogas that is produced on the farm using surprisingly accessible technology: ordinary silage pits filled with green manure in a process known as dry anaerobic digestion.
This produces not only methane for motor fuel but it also reduces the volume of green manure, which concentrates its nutrient value. It allows farmer Markus Eerola to apply the nutrients to the soils on the farm that are most deficient rather than ploughing in the green manure in situ.
Finnish farmer Kari Koppelmäki fills his car with biogas extracted from his farms silage pit in the middle of the Finnish winter.
The result equals more cereals and more biofuel. The Knehtilän farm has found a way to overcome the old dilemma of competition between food and biofuel, and in the process redefined the meaning of the Finnish word Ympäristöystävällisimpänä (“most sustainable”).
In the Netherlands, the ERF farm is redefining the meaning of “nature-inclusive farming” by growing their crops, the same crops that they have always grown, in narrow strips rather than entire fields. Why would they do this?
Seven years of research show that the mixing of crops slows the outbreaks of pests and diseases as they struggle to find their target crops between the strips. At the same time, as the variety of crops ensures that there is biomass on the field at all times, strip-cropping allows the natural enemies of pests to move in faster from adjacent crops.
We have also turned our attention to one of the countries where climate-smart agriculture is most challenging – Ireland.
With more ruminants than people, and an absence of heavy industry, Ireland’s national greenhouse gas profile is dominated by methane emissions from bovine animals, something which is notoriously difficult to mitigate.
Unsurprisingly, beef production has received negative attention in the media, both for its impact on human health and the environment. At our Lighthouse Farm at the Lands at Dowth, we partner with Devenish Nutrition and University College Dublin to turn this challenge into a success story.
The question we are asking is, can we design ruminant production systems that contribute positively to human health, to climate mitigation and to biodiversity? Early results from our joint research team encourage us to search for solutions from the soil all the way to society.
Common ingredients to success
Together, our 11 Lighthouse Farms (note that we have left open one vacancy to complete the dozen) show the diversity of solutions that are available, and necessary, for global agriculture to meet the sustainability challenge of the next generation.
Do we expect each Lighthouse Farm to be perfect in all dimensions of sustainability? No. Lighthouse Farms, too, are continuously evolving and adapting to changing priorities but each Lighthouse Farm does radically redefine at least one dimension of sustainability.
Do we expect all farmers to relate to every lighthouse example? No, we don’t, but we have selected our network so that all farmers can find inspiration from at least one of the Lighthouse Farms.
Yet, despite their diversity, their different approaches, their different scales of operation and the vastly different climates they are operating in, all of our Lighthouse Farms also have many common ingredients.
It is these common ingredients that we have been studying over the last few years as they provide the keys for farmers to design their own future-proof farming systems. So far, we have found three secrets to the success of all Lighthouse Farms.
1 Harnessing the power of complexity: all Lighthouse Farms make use of complexity by combining multiple varieties and crops (Netherlands), mixed swards (Ireland) and indeed a range of farm enterprises (Latvia, Finland and Spain).
When we visited our colleague Dr Uma Khumairoh on the island of Java in Indonesia, she brought us on a tour of complex rice systems.
Here, farmers combine paddy rice production with the cultivation of azolla, fish, ducks and border plants.
Azolla is an aquatic plant that fixes nitrogen from the air much like white clover in grassland. The ducks provide pest control, as well as eggs, while the fish recycle nutrients and provide a valuable source of protein and income.
Border plants diversify the household menu and serve as habitats for biodiversity. On their own, each of these components struggles to deliver food in the absence of chemical inputs but assembled together, they work in synergy and deliver both a healthy diet and sustainability as human-made ecosystems.
We find the same principles apply in a very different part of the world in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil. The Atlantic rainforest is one of the biodiversity hotspots of the world but now less than 20% of its original size remains today.
Here, we find ourselves exploring the successional agro-forestry systems of Fazenda da Toca. This system has complex, multi-year rotations of vegetables, bushes, citrus trees and woody perennials that together deliver a variety of food and wood products and, equally important, create corridors between the last remaining patches of virgin rainforest.
The Atlantic rainforest is one of the biodiversity hotspots of the world but now less than 20% of its original size remains today
But managing complexity does not come easily. If it was easy, we would have seen a lot more farms reaping its benefits. Complexity comes at a price. It takes labour and it demands a lot of knowledge.
2 Combining ecology and technology: to manage the labour requirements, all Lighthouse Farms combine their human-made ecosystem approach with new technologies.
Technology comes in many forms. In some cases, it comes in the form of steel such as the roller-crimper technology used by our arable Lighthouse Farm in Austria.
This one-pass machinery rolls the green manure for direct-drilling of the next crop, providing an instant mulch layer that provides nutrients, protects the soil surface and prevents weeds. As we are increasing the diversity of crops we have joint robotics experts who are designing autonomous machinery to tend to the crops.
But technology can also come in the form of management support tools for farmers. In Colombia, our climate-smart Lighthouse Farm village base their decisions on long-term climatic forecasts made by scientists from the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture.
Similarly, we are building holographic interactive landscapes for our lighthouse community in Northern Ethiopia to support them in science-based decision-making. In all its manifestations it is the clever use of technology to unlock and support ecology that allows Lighthouse Farmers to manage their complex systems.
3 Working together to manage the knowledge: the final ingredient to success is that each of our Lighthouse Farms has found a way for people to work together. It is immensely challenging to reinvent farming systems so that sustainability becomes the engine, rather than a constraint, for profitability.
If there is one thing that we have learnt then it is that farmers cannot be expected to make that transformation alone. But our Lighthouse Farms have shown that this goal is within reach if we get people to work together, both within the farm but also within the wider rural community. These collaborations, too, come in many forms.
Our Latvian dairy/caviar/power-station farm is so complex that the Pilvere family employs a hundred experts, from vets to fish farmers to full-time technicians in the anaerobic digestion plant to ensure they have all the expertise needed.
A similar picture appears in a different setting. At our urban Lighthouse Farm in Havana, Cuba, farmer Isis Maria Salcine Milla employs a hundred staff, each with their own skill sets, to grow food in the middle of the city.
Closer to the equator, expert knowledge is brought together in many forms that are appropriate to local conditions and traditions. In Brazil, this is in the form of a large organic company called Rizoma. In Ethiopia, it comes in the form of local community-supported land management plans, while in Colombia it is brought together through strong institutional arrangements.
Global classroom
and laboratory
This shared learning encouraged us to bring our Lighthouse Farms together as part of our Global Network of Lighthouse Farms, which will act as our global classroom and laboratory. Together, the Lighthouse Farms shine their light as inspiring examples of new solutions on the horizon that are available to our farmers and food industry.
Together, we learn to inspire the next generation of farmers. The Lighthouse Farms also inspire our students here at Wageningen University who will become the next generation of farmers, policymakers and industry captains.
Stay tuned and watch out for our upcoming column in the Irish Farmers Journal to explore each Lighthouse Farm and to learn with us as we continue our quest for ingredients to successful entrepreneurship and business models.
You can explore the Lighthouse Farms from the comfort of your home at: https://www.Lighthouse Farmnetwork.com/ Or follow us on Twitter
@FSElighthouse or Instagram @FSElighthouse
Thanks to Dr Annemiek Pas Schrijver, Dr Vivian Valencia and Mariana Debernardini for their input on this article.
Rogier Schulte of Wageningen University introduces the Lighthouse Farms project, which brings together 11 farms from around the world that are meeting 2050 sustainability goals.
When designing early maps of the world, the first cartographers wrote “Hic sunt dracones” on the fringes of their maps, meaning “here be dragons” – this is as far as our knowledge extends.
Today, the world needs new solutions to old challenges.
How can we sustain the essential service of food production within the resources of our planet in such a way that it can absorb biological, financial or climate shocks? The majority of farmers that I have worked with over the last 20 years are proud custodians of the countryside but are grappling with the competing demands for environmental and economic sustainability.
For these farmers, how can we circumnavigate today’s dragons and chart a path towards a future that is sustainable in the widest sense of the word?
At the Farming System Ecology group of Wageningen University and Research, we set sail to explore the world in search of Lighthouse Farms.
These are farms in the “new reality” that are already operating as if they are in the year 2050.
They have somehow escaped the pragmatic constraints that most farmers find themselves in and have found new ways to make sustainability the engine, rather than the constraint, for profitability.
We find them where we least expect them or where we weren’t necessarily looking. Beside a busy motorway in the Netherlands. In the deserted inlands of Spain. In the middle of urban Havana. And in the moon-like landscapes of northern Ethiopia.
An agro-forestry system in Brazil. It takes a village to manage a successional agro-forestry farm. In areas with high unemployment, this is seen as a welcome development.
Sometimes they stand out, visually, in the landscape, while others blend in, like any other farm.
Across the continents, we have brought 11 of the finest exemplars together in our global network of Lighthouse Farms.
Welcome to Latvia
Last year, we made our second visit to our Lighthouse Farm in Latvia, AS Ziedi JP. Driving the unpaved road, the forest opens up to large fields and a collection of large industrially sized buildings. Not quite the arcadia where you’d take your family on a camping trip, but inside these buildings the Pilvere family has redefined what we know as circular agriculture.
The Pilvere family has cleverly combined 1,000 dairy cows, six anaerobic digesters, two industrial generators and dozens of fish tanks so that the farm produces milk, meat, electricity, fish fillets and caviar.
What is the main product of this farm and what is the byproduct? That depends on your interest. Economically, this is a caviar farm powered by the heat from the regenerator that runs on methane belched out by the dairy cows.
There are contrasting approaches to sustainability that have similar ingredients brought together using different recipes that depend on the environments and societies that farms find themselves in
From an energy perspective, this farm is a power station that happens to produce food on the side. If our interest is in biomass flows, then this farm is a dairy farm with a diversity of additional end-products.
What makes AS Ziedi JP a Lighthouse Farm is that it has redefined the concept of circularity. It has moved beyond the concept of “recycling byproducts”. In fact, it makes the distinction between “main product” and “byproduct” irrelevant.
Redefining sustainability
Circularity, or circular agriculture, is merely one of many dimensions of sustainability. Others include climate-smart agriculture, nature-inclusive farming, agro-ecology, regenerative agriculture, conservation agriculture and community-supported agriculture.
There are contrasting approaches to sustainability that have similar ingredients brought together using different recipes that depend on the environments and societies that farms find themselves in. Irish agriculture is shaped by ruminants so it is no surprise that the climate dimension takes centre stage in the national discussion on sustainability.
Nor is it surprising that Dutch agriculture, with its large manure surplus, focuses on circularity. Or that the focus further south in the Mediterranean region threatened by land degradation is on regenerative agriculture.
We have carefully brought together our network of Lighthouse Farms so that each radically redefines at least one of these dimensions of sustainability.
Ympäristöystävällisimpänä
Take the Knehtilän cereal farm in Palopuro in southern Finland. As we turn into the yard on a visit to the farm our host Kari Koppelmäki fills his car with biogas that is produced on the farm using surprisingly accessible technology: ordinary silage pits filled with green manure in a process known as dry anaerobic digestion.
This produces not only methane for motor fuel but it also reduces the volume of green manure, which concentrates its nutrient value. It allows farmer Markus Eerola to apply the nutrients to the soils on the farm that are most deficient rather than ploughing in the green manure in situ.
Finnish farmer Kari Koppelmäki fills his car with biogas extracted from his farms silage pit in the middle of the Finnish winter.
The result equals more cereals and more biofuel. The Knehtilän farm has found a way to overcome the old dilemma of competition between food and biofuel, and in the process redefined the meaning of the Finnish word Ympäristöystävällisimpänä (“most sustainable”).
In the Netherlands, the ERF farm is redefining the meaning of “nature-inclusive farming” by growing their crops, the same crops that they have always grown, in narrow strips rather than entire fields. Why would they do this?
Seven years of research show that the mixing of crops slows the outbreaks of pests and diseases as they struggle to find their target crops between the strips. At the same time, as the variety of crops ensures that there is biomass on the field at all times, strip-cropping allows the natural enemies of pests to move in faster from adjacent crops.
We have also turned our attention to one of the countries where climate-smart agriculture is most challenging – Ireland.
With more ruminants than people, and an absence of heavy industry, Ireland’s national greenhouse gas profile is dominated by methane emissions from bovine animals, something which is notoriously difficult to mitigate.
Unsurprisingly, beef production has received negative attention in the media, both for its impact on human health and the environment. At our Lighthouse Farm at the Lands at Dowth, we partner with Devenish Nutrition and University College Dublin to turn this challenge into a success story.
The question we are asking is, can we design ruminant production systems that contribute positively to human health, to climate mitigation and to biodiversity? Early results from our joint research team encourage us to search for solutions from the soil all the way to society.
Common ingredients to success
Together, our 11 Lighthouse Farms (note that we have left open one vacancy to complete the dozen) show the diversity of solutions that are available, and necessary, for global agriculture to meet the sustainability challenge of the next generation.
Do we expect each Lighthouse Farm to be perfect in all dimensions of sustainability? No. Lighthouse Farms, too, are continuously evolving and adapting to changing priorities but each Lighthouse Farm does radically redefine at least one dimension of sustainability.
Do we expect all farmers to relate to every lighthouse example? No, we don’t, but we have selected our network so that all farmers can find inspiration from at least one of the Lighthouse Farms.
Yet, despite their diversity, their different approaches, their different scales of operation and the vastly different climates they are operating in, all of our Lighthouse Farms also have many common ingredients.
It is these common ingredients that we have been studying over the last few years as they provide the keys for farmers to design their own future-proof farming systems. So far, we have found three secrets to the success of all Lighthouse Farms.
1 Harnessing the power of complexity: all Lighthouse Farms make use of complexity by combining multiple varieties and crops (Netherlands), mixed swards (Ireland) and indeed a range of farm enterprises (Latvia, Finland and Spain).
When we visited our colleague Dr Uma Khumairoh on the island of Java in Indonesia, she brought us on a tour of complex rice systems.
Here, farmers combine paddy rice production with the cultivation of azolla, fish, ducks and border plants.
Azolla is an aquatic plant that fixes nitrogen from the air much like white clover in grassland. The ducks provide pest control, as well as eggs, while the fish recycle nutrients and provide a valuable source of protein and income.
Border plants diversify the household menu and serve as habitats for biodiversity. On their own, each of these components struggles to deliver food in the absence of chemical inputs but assembled together, they work in synergy and deliver both a healthy diet and sustainability as human-made ecosystems.
We find the same principles apply in a very different part of the world in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil. The Atlantic rainforest is one of the biodiversity hotspots of the world but now less than 20% of its original size remains today.
Here, we find ourselves exploring the successional agro-forestry systems of Fazenda da Toca. This system has complex, multi-year rotations of vegetables, bushes, citrus trees and woody perennials that together deliver a variety of food and wood products and, equally important, create corridors between the last remaining patches of virgin rainforest.
The Atlantic rainforest is one of the biodiversity hotspots of the world but now less than 20% of its original size remains today
But managing complexity does not come easily. If it was easy, we would have seen a lot more farms reaping its benefits. Complexity comes at a price. It takes labour and it demands a lot of knowledge.
2 Combining ecology and technology: to manage the labour requirements, all Lighthouse Farms combine their human-made ecosystem approach with new technologies.
Technology comes in many forms. In some cases, it comes in the form of steel such as the roller-crimper technology used by our arable Lighthouse Farm in Austria.
This one-pass machinery rolls the green manure for direct-drilling of the next crop, providing an instant mulch layer that provides nutrients, protects the soil surface and prevents weeds. As we are increasing the diversity of crops we have joint robotics experts who are designing autonomous machinery to tend to the crops.
But technology can also come in the form of management support tools for farmers. In Colombia, our climate-smart Lighthouse Farm village base their decisions on long-term climatic forecasts made by scientists from the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture.
Similarly, we are building holographic interactive landscapes for our lighthouse community in Northern Ethiopia to support them in science-based decision-making. In all its manifestations it is the clever use of technology to unlock and support ecology that allows Lighthouse Farmers to manage their complex systems.
3 Working together to manage the knowledge: the final ingredient to success is that each of our Lighthouse Farms has found a way for people to work together. It is immensely challenging to reinvent farming systems so that sustainability becomes the engine, rather than a constraint, for profitability.
If there is one thing that we have learnt then it is that farmers cannot be expected to make that transformation alone. But our Lighthouse Farms have shown that this goal is within reach if we get people to work together, both within the farm but also within the wider rural community. These collaborations, too, come in many forms.
Our Latvian dairy/caviar/power-station farm is so complex that the Pilvere family employs a hundred experts, from vets to fish farmers to full-time technicians in the anaerobic digestion plant to ensure they have all the expertise needed.
A similar picture appears in a different setting. At our urban Lighthouse Farm in Havana, Cuba, farmer Isis Maria Salcine Milla employs a hundred staff, each with their own skill sets, to grow food in the middle of the city.
Closer to the equator, expert knowledge is brought together in many forms that are appropriate to local conditions and traditions. In Brazil, this is in the form of a large organic company called Rizoma. In Ethiopia, it comes in the form of local community-supported land management plans, while in Colombia it is brought together through strong institutional arrangements.
Global classroom
and laboratory
This shared learning encouraged us to bring our Lighthouse Farms together as part of our Global Network of Lighthouse Farms, which will act as our global classroom and laboratory. Together, the Lighthouse Farms shine their light as inspiring examples of new solutions on the horizon that are available to our farmers and food industry.
Together, we learn to inspire the next generation of farmers. The Lighthouse Farms also inspire our students here at Wageningen University who will become the next generation of farmers, policymakers and industry captains.
Stay tuned and watch out for our upcoming column in the Irish Farmers Journal to explore each Lighthouse Farm and to learn with us as we continue our quest for ingredients to successful entrepreneurship and business models.
You can explore the Lighthouse Farms from the comfort of your home at: https://www.Lighthouse Farmnetwork.com/ Or follow us on Twitter
@FSElighthouse or Instagram @FSElighthouse
Thanks to Dr Annemiek Pas Schrijver, Dr Vivian Valencia and Mariana Debernardini for their input on this article.
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