Jun 29, 2021
Editor’s Note: We, at Agritecture, believe that it is our social responsibility to work with impact-focused entrepreneurs and collectives to support food-insecure communities. Farms Not Arms is one such collective that we’ve had the pleasure of working with to design a multi-agricultural farm that combines regenerative agriculture with an adaptive low-tech hydroponic system. Their work aims to support the growing population of refugees in Lebanon. Learn more about similar impact projects here!
CONTENT SOURCED FROM FARMS NOT ARMS
Farms Not Arms Is Building Their First Farm In Zahle, Bekaa In Lebanon!
We’re happy to announce that we have launched our first farm, Turba, a women-led regenerative farm in Zahle, Bekaa, according to the Farms Not Arms design model.
Turba, the Arabic word for soil, encompasses our values and our focus of placing soil health front and center to heal our land, our communities, and our planet. We are employing regenerative principles to grow and cultivate healthy and nourishing food much more efficiently while creating a scalable farm model for food security.
Here is the land before we started prepping it to become the farm.
We’ve built a team of young farmers on the ground who are passionate about regeneration and who have been turning the land into the farm we envision since April.
You can see them building permanent raised beds to create the appropriate soil conditions before planting our land.
Education Program
We will begin our education and employment program late summer where Lebanese and refugee participants will receive training on the skills required to build and run a farm as well as paid work to practice their skills to be able to build regenerative farms.
2020 Recap
2020 was a crazy year to say the least, but in retrospect, it allowed us the space to reflect, strategize, and take action in order to blossom with newfound purpose and clearcut direction. We participated in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Food System Vision Prize where we landed as semi-finalists (we were in the top 14 out of 1400 applicants!), were selected as 1 of 4 special mentions and awarded a grant that helped us get off our feet.
Press and Articles
Our managing director, Jehane, was interviewed by Agritecture and our landscape architect, Emily Bauer, was interviewed by ArchiExpo.
Jehane has also written 3 blog posts – A Brief History of Lebanon's Downfall – and our Plan for its Regeneration; Launching a Food Forest Farm School for a Regenerative Food System; and Our Integrated Farm Design – that detail our vision, systemic context, and model. (follow us on Medium for more to come).
Follow us
The next couple of months are going to be full of new updates! Follow us on social media to stay updated on our journey to build our farm!
If you are in Lebanon, sign up below to stay updated on how to get your hands on some of our yummy veggies.
We look forward to growing together!
