On Pixel Farming / Lenora Ditzler

Architecture Off-Centre

A few weeks before the COVID lockdowns began in 2020, Rem Koolhaas’ much awaited exhibition Countryside opened in The Guggenheim museum in New York. It was in the exhibition’s thick but small pocket size handbook that I first came across Lenora Ditzler’s essay on pixel farming; a very innovative method of farming that questions the widespread monoculture and shows us a new way of looking at agriculture by dividing a farm into smaller pixels.

Lenora Ditzler works at the Farm Systems Ecology group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where she is the research coordinator for the Global Network of Lighthouse Farms. Her doctoral thesis titled ‘Towards Diversified Industrial Cropping Systems?’ proposed the design of cropping systems that qualify as both industrial and agroecological.

Lenora’s academic research: https://research.wur.nl/en/persons/lenora-ditzler