The case for the circular farm

When visitors first walk the farm, the question we get most often is which of our programmes is the main one. Are we a hatchery? An aquaponics installer? A BSF producer? A school? The honest answer is that the question contains a false premise. There is only one farm here, and it is circular by construction.

A linear farm buys inputs, produces an output, and discards the rest. Inputs cost money; discards cost more money; the whole arrangement is exposed to whatever shock — a feed price spike, a drought, a delayed delivery — happens to fall on the supply chain that week. Linear farms are easy to set up and expensive to run.

A circular farm uses the output of each component as the input of another. Fish waste feeds plants. Plant waste, kitchen waste and agricultural residues feed the BSF unit. BSF larvae feed the fish, and frass feeds the plants. The water cycles. The nutrients cycle. The wasted thing becomes the new starting material.

§ IThree honest claims

1. 1.Circular farms are cheaper to operate at steady state, because they buy fewer inputs.
2. 2.Circular farms are more resilient to price shocks, because they depend less on outside markets.
3. 3.Circular farms are better classrooms, because the relationships between parts are visible — and learnable.

§ IIWhat we are not claiming

We are not claiming that a circular farm pays for itself the day it is built. The capital cost is real. The learning curve is real. The first season is harder than the third. We are claiming that, over the long arc — the only arc that matters for an organisation that hopes to be alive in twenty years — a circular farm wins on cost, on resilience, and on the dignity of the work.

If you are thinking about your own farm, your own institution, your own community project — write to us. We will tell you what we know, and what we do not, and which version of the loop we think will fit your situation. There are dozens of possible loops. The right one for you is the one you can actually run.