Soil Building to Home Building
There’s a movement emerging that could create shared benefits in the worlds of regenerative agriculture and home building. This movement’s aim is to increase carbon capture strategies while simultaneously contributing to greater health and wellness outcomes in the built environment.
Think of it as a farm-to-frame movement similar to that as the farm-to-table movement which has helped to cultivate stronger bioregional food systems.
Hemp panel homes at Hillside Center for Sustainable Living
While mass timber enjoys the bulk of the press on emerging carbon sequestering building technologies, there is a significant group of builders, building material manufacturers, architects, and designers who are organizing and initiating a concerted effort to lift up the biobased material building industry and closing the loop with regenerative farmers in the region for a tight interdependent supply chain. The biobased materials include straw, hemp, sorghum, etc.
This group, based out of the US Northeast, is spearheaded by Mass Design Group and New Frameworks, and includes over 70 other professionals and leaders in this space. Additionally, there is a Northeast Hemp Hub and Westcoast Biobased Materials Guild emerging as well.
The building side of the equation is poised and generating more and more demand for these agricultural products to find a values-aligned market in the built environment.
Hillside Center for Sustainable Living, a neighborhood scale hemp panel project in MA
I’m actively engaged in a several working groups within the Northeast Biobased Materials Collective to connect regenerative farming and building product manufacturing communities through bioregional supply networks.
The farm-to-table movement has found its way into many markets, and it’s fair to say it’s inspired greater awareness of our connection to our food, the farmers, and the soils that support this nutrient flow. I’m inspired to see this movement enter the built environment in a more significant way in the coming years.
It’s still early, but this movement is markedly different from the existing natural building niches that never enjoyed mass appeal or application.
This time it’s different.
Architects, building material manufacturers, and engineers are seeing the potential and necessity of this shift. A couple months ago Parsons Healthy Materials Lab hosted a forum in New York City to highlight this movement. In past generations of natural building, I couldn’t have imagined these materials being featured in a room full of NYC architects and designers.
Call to Action
There’s so much more to share on this and so many other partners to celebrate in this space. If you’re seeking to integrate these biobased materials in your development, or in the biobased building material or regenerative agriculture space, and would like to connect, please reach out to me, David Todd.
For related reading, see also Reimagining the Three Little Pigs.
For related listening, our co-founder and podcast host, Neal Collins, had a great conversation with Jacob Deva Racusin of New Frameworks, where they explore this space further. You can listen here.
Hemp panels being craned into place at Hillside Center for Sustainable Living
Photos are from the Hillside Center for Sustainable Living. This not a Latitude Regenerative Real Estate project, but they are intended to depict one application of biobased materials in the built environment—in this case the primary material innovation is the hemp panel system.
