Restoring Dignity: Designers come together to create sustainable Live Stock farms.

Overview

With a growing population, the consumption and popularity of meat and dairy products have been skyrocketing. A lot of ethnic origins advocated for a balanced plant origin and animal origin diet – or at least constraints to balancing both. But as we urbanize more, meat and dairy consumption globally has grown 400% in the last decades and is continuing to grow more. 

With a growing city population and sectoral depletion of natural resources not only animal habitats close to cities have shrunk to almost limits. At the same time, an entire industry is now set up to raise livestock in closed atmospheres and feed them with genetically modified food and medicines for raising yields. 

This leads to not only poor living conditions for animals – at the same time humans consuming dairy, meat products are prone to ingesting such chemicals and agents with them.

Where is the balance? 

While the world is pushing towards plant-based diet and vegetarianism, deteriorating conditions of animal farms are still a persistent issue for most places globally. The lack of design thinking and empathy in developing the right kind of livestock farms is a major cause of diseases and even the pandemic we are living through. Everything is somehow related to such mismanagement at the ground level.

‘It is what we eat‘– It has always been saying and understood by all since childhood. If that’s the case then why do humans eat from places that are cruel and unhealthy for animals themselves?

Design Challenge

The design subject has been always paradoxical and never addressed in general. 

How can we bring design ingenuity and instill more empathy in building the right kind of dairy, poultry, livestock farms?

This challenge looked at a dairy farm for cattle in a peri-urban condition. Consumption of dairy is global yet the farms they come from are always an afterthought. 

The design of the farm as an exercise is often ignored and eventually ends up being an efficiency problem of fitting more and more in less space which shouldn’t be the case. 

The problem was to understand economic restraints and deliver a balanced living environment for dairy farms.

How many levels should be placed? How can hygiene be efficiently practiced? If there are limited grazing areas how can we ensure there are enough physical activities for animals? How much lighting and air should be enough? How can resting areas or outdoor areas make a balanced life possible in restrained spaces? How can we excise weather control in such tight budgets – especially in extreme climates? And similar questions require to be answered in this design challenge. 

The jury for the competition consisted of esteemed designers, professionals, and academicians from around the world. The Lead Jurors for the competitions were as follows: 

Ariel Alvarado, General Manager, AE Arquitectos, Nicaragua

Caroline Hickey, Director, Bosske Architecture, Australia

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Some of the Best of competition projects are:

 

Winning Project: STACKED-STOCK

By: Ananya Biswas

^{Fig: 1 PTFE Sheet}

Description: This project aims to design a stacked system farm by keeping in mind the psychological and physical aspects of the livestock.

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People’s Choice: COW SHED

By: Weronika Smentek

^{Fig: 2 Farm image}

Description: We are students in the 3rd year of architecture at the Poznan University of Technology. The assumption of our project was to design a farm for cows with dimensions 60x60 m. We wanted it to be fairly classic in style but with modern technologies and environmentally friendly. We made sure that the animals had adequate space, lighting, and enclosure.

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Institutional Excellence: Ecological grazing of Friesian sheep

By:  Wiktoria Michalowska & Martyna Staszkiewicz

^{Fig: 3 Building Facades}

Description: It is a project showing that sheep farming can be animal and environment-friendly. The solutions we use are easy and common to use. We believe that the happiness of animals inbreeding is the most important.

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Editor’s Choice: Cowtopia

By: Ziyao Wang

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Description: This plan started with the protection of animal welfare and proposed the idea of creating a harmonious pasture environment in order to solve the safety problem of dairy products from the source and bring well-being to human life ultimately.

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Editor’s Choice: Cyclovis - A sustainable Sheep Farm

By: Dominik Szczeszynski & Zuzanna Cywinska

^{Fig: 5 Cover image}

Description: Cyclovia is the original in form, and reasonable in function. It is the project that aims to be truly modern - not only in technical solutions but also in trying to be more conscious about the wellbeing of the animals.

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