Flip Clip: Growing Food at Arcosanti

During our recent visit to Arcosanti, we got a chance to see how the desert community is working to build up sustainable food production. Arcosanti is a community that in many ways strives to be self-sufficient, and producing organic food on-site would be a major step in that direction.

As you can see from the scale model of the greenhouses pictured at the bottom of this post, plans for food production at Arcosanti are pretty ambitious. However, they currently have just one experimental greenhouse where they're testing to see which plants they can grow in the climate. So far, organic lettuce, tomatoes and various herbs are productive enough to be used in the main kitchen that feeds the fifty permanent residents of Arcosanti.

We saw a variety of edible plants on the grounds including olive and apricot trees plus a good number of chickens, guinea hens, peacocks and one lone duck! In addition to the greenhouses, there are also nearby fields that have been farmed in recent years, but because the community's agricultural specialist moved on, they aren't producing any food right now. Our tour guide Lindsay also mentioned that the community is planning to grow a variety of blue corn in their fields in partnership with a local Hopi tribe.

Arcosanti: An Experiment in Sustainable Living

Arcosanti was an unplanned stop on the Southwest Tour, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting places we've been. The driving principle behind Arcosanti is "arcology," a term coined by the mastermind behind the development, architect Paolo Soleri, that describes a combination of architecture and ecology.

Soleri sought to concentrate large numbers of people in dense living quarters, limiting the impact on the surrounding lands, which are either kept wild or used for agriculture. True to that goal, Arcosanti sits on more than 4,000 acres of protected land, while the 50-100 residents live on only about 25 acres. Soleri's buildings are built on a pretty steep ravine, looking out on some pretty stunning landscape. His buildings are designed to take full advantage of passive solar heat in the winter, and most of them have nice cross-ventilation to cool them in the summer.

Dorothée and I took a tour of the grounds yesterday in hopes of learning about the way they produce food at Arcosanti. We were pretty impressed by the architecture and the natural beauty of the site, and after the tour, our guide Lindsay took us down to show us some of the experimental greenhouses.

-Mark