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In publication continuously since 1792, The Old Farmer’s Almanac contains weather forecasts, tide tables, planting charts, astronomical data, and articles on environmental data and trends. Originally founded by Robert B. Thomas, the Almanac predicts weather up to 18 months in advance using a combined study of solar activity, weather patterns, and atmospherics. The mathematics behind their high success rate has been stored in a black box at the headquarters in Dublin, New Hampshire. The competitive market of predictive weather has always been essential to a farmer’s operational successes, and this is the context in which the Almanac emerged. Combined with Thomas’s original “secret formula,” the Almanac today uses advanced enviro-veillance technologies in solar science, climatology, and meteorology. Originally intended solely as a calendar, competition encouraged the almanac’s supplementary material to ultimately occupy a majority of the published material. The 2010 Canadian Edition, for example includes only 40 pages of calendar from its total 256 pages. This same 2010 edition featured supplementary material such as an article about green manure titled “The Old and New Farmer’s Essential Manure Manual,” another article titled “What is Normal Weather?” by Peter Spotts, and an article on botanical nomenclature titled “Ghosts in your Garden?” by Cynthia van Hazinga. Early almanacs, preceding the Farmer’s Almanac were centered on predicting the position of the sun (sometimes up to four years in advance), while later editions expanded to include supplementary projections, such as horoscopic divinations. Almanacs have served as an essential medium of common cultural understanding of the future. In the 1600s, many English-language almanacs were bestsellers and had almost 400,000 other almanacs to compete with for such a title. Rather than as a journal, a magazine, or an annual, Bracket’s preferred publishing format takes its cues from the Almanac. Instead of a calendar, tabular charts, or data sheets, Bracket offers a design almanac–—predictions through writing and design. As a predictive medium, Bracket seeks to interrogate the fertile territory where architecture, environment, and digital culture collide; these transdisciplinary alignments themselves a prediction of emerging collaborations between the analog and the digital. Architecture is not only a byproduct of predictions, but Architecture itself is a prediction machine. Its inherent slowness necessitates a Farmer’s Almanac-like forecasting of its site’s future: future weather, future society, future politics, future economics, and future ecologies, to name a few. The first issue of Bracket is titled “On Farming” partially in homage to the long-standing immediacy of the Farmer’s Almanac, and also to further isolate and interrogate a contemporary phenomenon that has managed to proliferate within both the wider environment and digital culture, which has made it an ideal initial platform for Bracket’s inaugural issue. Toward a broader understanding of its theme, Bracket assembles an issue-specific editorial board to review submitted projects and texts. For “On Farming,” we have engaged Fritz Haeg, Heather Ring, Michael Speaks, Charles Waldheim, Nathalie de Vries, as well as this issue’s editors, Maya Przybylski and Mason White. Through the selection of the projects and texts featured here, farming emerges less as a conscious practice than a
on farming
Robert B. Thomas’ The Farmer's Almanack (1810) and The Old
Farmer's Almanac (1910).
collective behavior across mediums. Agriculture, but also information, energy, and labor can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming are mutable, parametric, and efficient. From terraforming to foodsheds to crowdsourcing, farming often involves the management of the natural mediated by the technologic. Farming, beyond its most common agricultural understanding is the modification of infrastructure, urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes toward a privileging of production. With a global food crisis looming, even the traditional farm’s impact on land, resources, and economics is in need of re-visioning. Innovations have led to a growing number of people investing in shares of a local farmer’s crop, reducing trips to the supermarket and the cost of shipping food. Energy farming has seen immense diversification in the last decade with essential innovations in renewable energies such as wave farms, wind, tidal, solar, among others. Investment in wind power alone rose from an $8 billion per year plateau from 2002-2004 to more than $18 billion annually on average for 2008-2010, with most of the growth in North America and Asia. Information farming has also experienced considerable rise in the last 5 years and, in fact, could be architecture’s newest building typology, the “data campus.” Google completed a 30-acre server farm in Oregon on converted agricultural land in 2006. The town of Quincy, Washington has seen Yahoo, Microsoft, and Intuit establish large internet data-processing facilities. Fish farms, server farms, energy farms, information farms, Wikipedia, Twitter; our contemporary daily life owes so much to the resourceful, convenient intelligence of farming. How is it shaping or how could it shape our design environments? How are these developments shaping our larger environment? And what are new potentials for these typologies? These are the issues and questions that designers and writers have been asked to respond to in the first edition of Bracket, “On Farming.”
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