Future perspectives – Farm of tomorrow

Amid exciting dilemmas, illustrated by visual storyteller Rogier Klomp, the Embassy of Food provides a space for gathering. Here, designers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, farmers, experts, and business leaders come together. Together, we explore how their innovative ideas can change the future of our food. Designers play a central role in sharing their visions and discoveries, allowing us to look beyond the usual boundaries.

The Embassy of Food has selected five designers as guides who take us to the core of the elements that shape our food system. This includes surprising perspectives on the nutrient cycle, the revaluation of unexplored layers as sources of solutions, and even what artificial intelligence can mean for better understanding our natural ecosystems.

These insights are not just for experts. They are meant for you and me. They challenge us to think about how we grow, buy, and eat our food. They invite us to question our habits and choices and discover new possibilities for ourselves. Together, we can positively impact how we taste, see, and experience food.

Fides Lapidaire – Broodje Poep

What does poop have to do with food? If you ask designer Fides Lapidaire, the answer is clear: “Everything!” As a Social Designer, Fides Lapidaire offers unexpected perspectives on complex societal issues. With her project Poop Sandwich (Broodje Poep), she collaborates with farmers, policymakers, nature experts, and entrepreneurs to close the nutrient cycle. Poop is, in fact, food for the soil, on which new plants grow or animals graze, which are then consumed again. Currently, we mainly produce food without truly giving back to the soil. How do we loop this system?

Fides’s strength lies in her willingness not to fully understand the system. She looks where you wouldn’t expect and uncovers new questions. She accompanies these new perspectives with an experience, creating movement through engagement. From closing the nutrient cycle by selling “Poop Sandwiches” to an erotic carrot experience that explores our food system, Fides Lapidaire sheds a different light on what we think we know.

With the Embassy of Food, we look at how we can better understand what our food eats and how we can highlight it in relation to the future of our food.

For more information, visit: Fides Lapidaire’s website

Charlotte van der Woude – Soil of Gold

Soil is as exciting as the depth of the seas. But you usually just walk past it. In fact, you walk on top of it. What makes the soil so special? Charlotte van der Woude explores the situation of farms on state land in the project Rich Farmland (Rijk Boerenland) and discovers that the old soil of the Zuiderzee offers interesting solutions for the future of our agriculture. For example, a farmer works on former beachfront land, and to prevent sand from blowing away, he plants new shrubs and trees. Could this also be a solution for depleted soils to rebuild a rich soil life?

Under the name Cosmos Landschap, Van der Woude continues working on her projects based on the abovementioned method. The focus here is on how natural processes such as soil and water can be better integrated into our cities and landscapes. She also seeks answers to what our living environment would look like.

She enjoys collaborating with users of the places she works on, such as residents, owners, and farmers, to develop layered and nuanced plans. In the context of the Young Innovator program 2022, she worked with various farmers to explore possible future perspectives for the Noordoostpolder, with the aim of starting a dialogue between policy and practice.

With the Embassy of Food, we look at how the landscape, agriculture, and policy choices are intertwined and how they affect the health of the soil.

For more information, visit: Cosmos Landschap’s website

Marrit Kyung Ok Schakel – Buitenverwachting

Marrit is a farmer, cheese maker, biodiversity activist, and mother. Her farm, Buitenverwachting, is a place full of diversity; from plants, and different animals, to people. You can taste this diversity in her products. The yoghurt she makes is cow-specific. That means each of her cows has its own yoghurt made. Each cow tastes different.

They aim for small-scale and artisanal dairy production as the norm, resulting in a different landscape and a better life for the animals, such as calves and lambs that roam with their mothers in the herb-rich pasture. Can you taste that? Can you make biodiversity taste good? We explore this with Marrit through the Embassy of Food.

Dirk-Jan Visser | New Horizon Initiative

When a city dweller looks at the countryside, they often see “nature.” But is this really the case? And what (free) space does nature have in the future of our landscape? Dirk-Jan Visser is a documentary photographer and teacher with a background in fine arts and journalism. In his new project, the New Horizon Initiative, he explores the relationship between humans and non-human entities and their importance in a landscape. The landscape of the Netherlands is, in fact, man-made. But for whom? And what place does nature have in it? Using artificial intelligence and based on a visual stakeholder analysis, the project visualises and describes the various interests of non-human life in a landscape. The outcome of this analysis should provide policymakers with more insight into the importance of non-human life in relation to the political and administrative agenda.

For the Embassy of Food, Visser and Drake map out how Dutch agriculture would look through the eyes of different plants and animals, such as the Montagu’s harrier, a protected species with a special connection to Dutch fields.

Bram de Vos I Uprooting Urbanism

The common thread with Bram de Vos is that he provides answers to the pain points that cities face. This involves a mix of complex questions about our living environment. Bram bridges the worlds of new abstract ideas and where the questions lie. He designs the overarching plan where many disciplines collaborate for new possibilities.

Bram de Vos explores how local food production can make cities more resilient. Productive landscapes, urban and rural, can promote interaction between diverse backgrounds and cultures. This ultimately results in a transparent and stronger sense of community. He engages in conversations with parties such as water authorities, farmers, and consumers to explore various visions of this landscape. Through models and presentations, he aims to visually bring together different interests and solutions, making them tangible. He strives for a less abstract approach to arrive at shared insights and new ideas. His goal is to restore the societal role of the farmer and create more robust, productive landscapes for a sustainable future.

With the Embassy of Food, Bram explores what the ideal 10-hectare food landscape would look like, who is needed, and who is responsible for executing it as effectively as possible.