FORBES LIPSCHITZ
Forbes Lipschitz - Associate Professor and the Graduate Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Knowlton School; Founder of the Working Landscapes Lab
Forbes Lipschitz is an Associate Professor and the Graduate Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University. She is the founder of the Working Landscape Lab and faculty affiliate for the Initiative in Food and AgriCultural Transformation. She has been recognized nationally and internationally through awards from The Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, the Graham Foundation for Fine Arts, Van Alen Institute, and in publications including Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Smithsonian Magazine. She is currently working on a book project, Beast Mode: Livestock and the Architecture of Biopower, exploring the infrastructure of animal agriculture in the United States through a visual inquiry into its built environment across several species.
Her research is focused on contemporary agro-industrial enterprises and their effects on social, cultural, economic, and environmental function. She has extensively mapped and analyzed agricultural practice across the United States using new methods of geo-visualization for design and engagement. We were excited to speak with Forbes about her work exploring ways for design to help communities better understand and engage with agrarian landscapes and systems.
What do you enjoy most about focusing your research on 'Working Landscapes?'
I really value the spatial, material and cultural diversity of working landscapes. Given that agriculture is the largest anthropogenic land use in the world, it means that I can encounter different working landscapes wherever I go. This has allowed me to engage with a wide variety of sites and systems in both my teaching and research, whether designing blackbear corridors through the sugarcane fields of southern Louisiana, finding opportunities to enhance migratory bird habitat within catfish aquaculture ponds in Mississippi, or rethinking drainage systems in the corn and soy fields of Ohio.
How have you used visual representation and communication tools in your engagement with rural communities to build interaction and understanding?
Nowadays, not many people get the chance to experience agricultural landscapes firsthand. As our working landscapes have become more and more mechanized and our cities more urbanized, few of us have the opportunity to witness the planting, growing, and harvesting of crops or the breeding, raising, and processing of animals. This makes it hard for most consumers to grasp the intricacies hidden behind the outwardly simplified exterior of working landscapes. I’ve tried to challenge this paradigm through exhibits and installations that immerse urban residents in the spatial and ecological complexities of agriculture. When working with farmers and researchers who are already intimately familiar with the complexities of agriculture, I have to take a different approach. In these instances, simplifying the intricacies becomes essential. When hosting workshops on climate change adaptation with farmers, for example, we developed a game interface that allowed players to see the effects of their individual on-farm decisions on the larger community. So at the end of the day, It's about finding the right balance between unveiling the details to some and simplifying the narrative for others to appreciate the broader context.
Manure systems, image from Beast Mode: Livestock and the Architecture of Biopower
Talk to us about the importance of Agriculture Extension agencies for rural landowners. How would you like to see them operate differently?
The Cooperative Extension System is an incredible educational network that spans across the whole country. It brings together the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), land-grant universities, and local county governments to share research-based knowledge and expertise on agriculture and natural resources with farmers, ranchers, agricultural businesses, and the public in general. Though agricultural extension services could be a vital component of the climate solution, unfortunately, most extension agents focus mostly on conventional systems that rely heavily on chemical inputs and monocultural practices. I think its time to reconsider and reorient the role of extension. Embracing a more diverse, localized, and agroecological approach could pave the way for a stronger, more sustainable and more resilient food system. It's my aspiration for landscape architecture programs located within Land-Grant universities to take a more active role in this transition.
Field Futures: Adapt by Numbers, an exhibit curated by Forbes Lipschitz and designed by The Working Landscapes Lab
How do you engage with industrial agriculture, and where do you situate your work within the most common agricultural tropes at play in society today?
I typically avoid terms like “industrial agriculture” because they alienate people whose livelihoods depend on prevailing models of agricultural production, like commodity farming and intensive livestock production. In general, I think it can be difficult to talk about and debate the future of agriculture. Too often, we revert to the dichotomies between modern/traditional, conventional/alternative or industrial/sustainable. This kind of either/or mentality is less useful than considering how different types of management systems can contribute to environmental sustainability, climate resilience, and rural well-being. In my own work, that's why I try to engage with a diverse cross section of producers and stakeholders.
Protein mapping, image from Beast Mode: Livestock and the Architecture of Biopower
Lastly, What does your ideal future for the rural countryside look like?
That’s a tough question and one that is going to vary a lot depending on the types of productive systems and the specific cultural context of the rural community. So I’ll just speak to what I’m currently spending the majority of time thinking about, which are the landscapes of animal agriculture and the structures of biopower that govern them. Under the current model, animals are subjected to intensive confinement, genetic manipulation, and pharmaceutical interventions to maximize productivity and economic gains. This approach reduces animals to mere cogs in a profit-driven machine, largely disregarding their natural behaviors and intrinsic value as sentient beings. More than that, current practices undermine wild biodiversity by promoting monocultures and displacing natural habitat. So lately I’ve been imagining the transition from a model of biopower to one of bioempowerment. Such a model would foreground the well-being and agency of wild and domesticated animals alike. In a bioempowered system, animals would be given the freedom to express their natural behaviors, while enhancing biodiversity across scales. Such a system would recognize the interdependence between animal, human, and environmental well-being. I’m not sure exactly what this system looks like, but I want to find out.
Images provided by Forbes Lipschitz
