Food Systems & Edible Architecture
Build and protect soil, read a site for zones and sectors, lay out a food forest that will still be producing in thirty years, and design the interior growing zone of a Biotecture building — where treated greywater feeds what you eat.
What you'll be able to do
- Build soil and keep it covered in an arid climate
- Lay out zones, sectors and a seven-layer food forest at Southwest spacing
- Design an interior growing zone against the thermal mass and glazing
- Integrate animals, and aquaponics, without breaking the other systems
Syllabus
8 parts · 25 lessons · 195 quiz questions · ≈7.4 hours of reading · sign in to open lessons
Part A Food as a Building System
- 1 The Sixth System 13 min · 6 q
- 2 The Four Design Principles 14 min · 7 q
- 3 The Design Hierarchy 14 min · 7 q
Part B Soil
- 4 What Soil Is 17 min · 8 q
- 5 Composting 16 min · 8 q
- 6 Amendment, pH and No-Till 16 min · 8 q
Part C Designing the Landscape
- 7 Permaculture 15 min · 7 q
- 8 Zones and Sectors 16 min · 7 q
- 9 Keyline and Water-First Design 15 min · 7 q
- 10 Guilds and Polycultures 17 min · 8 q
Part D Edible Architecture — The Building Itself
- 11 The Indoor Growing Zone 16 min · 8 q
- 12 What Actually Grows There 17 min · 8 q
- 13 Treated Greywater — Why the Cell Grows Anything 25 min · 9 q
- 14 Thermal Mass, Light and the Growing Microclimate 16 min · 8 q
- 15 Standalone Growing Structures 16 min · 8 q
Part E The Food Forest
- 16 What a Food Forest Is 15 min · 7 q
- 17 Establishment and Succession 16 min · 8 q
- 18 Species for the Arid Southwest 16 min · 7 q
Part F Animals
- 19 Chickens 21 min · 9 q
- 20 Bees 17 min · 8 q
- 21 Larger Livestock 18 min · 8 q
Part G Aquaponics
- 22 How Aquaponics Works 20 min · 9 q
- 23 Aquaponics Off-Grid — The Honest Engineering 21 min · 9 q
Part H Community and Integration
- 24 Community-Scale Food Systems 19 min · 8 q
- 25 The Whole Loop 18 min · 8 q
Ref Appendices
- A1 Planting Calendar — Northern New Mexico
- A2 Species Quick Reference — Arid Southwest
- A3 Companion Planting — What Is Supported and What Is Folklore
- A4 The Treated Greywater Loop
- A5 Animal System Quick Reference
- A6 Aquaponics Water Quality
- A7 Glossary
Prerequisites
Course 1 — Site, Climate & Land Assessment. Courses 5, 7, 8 and 9 strongly recommended.
About this course
Course competency
On completing this course you can design food production as an integrated building and site system rather than an amenity: build and protect soil, read a site for zones and sectors, lay out a food forest that will still be producing in thirty years, design and plant the interior growing zone of a Biotecture building, understand what treated greywater is and why a botanical cell grows food, and know where the regulatory pathway for it is settled, integrate chickens, bees and larger livestock, evaluate aquaponics honestly against off-grid constraints, and design shared food infrastructure at community scale with governance that holds.
The missing system
The Biotecture model identifies six systems a self-sustaining building must integrate: structure, energy, water, liquid waste, food and community.
Five of those have well-developed design traditions in the natural building world. Food does not. It has historically entered building design at the level of a vegetable garden — present as an afterthought, not as a designed system carrying the same rigour applied to energy and water.
This course exists to close that gap.
And the gap matters more than the other five. Food systems account for about 34 per cent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions — the FAO and European Commission figure from the EDGAR-FOOD database, published in Nature Food in 2021, for the year 2015, down from 44 per cent in 1990 as other sectors grew faster. Agriculture consumes roughly 70 per cent of global freshwater withdrawals and occupies about half of the world's habitable land. It is the dominant driver of tropical deforestation, topsoil loss and freshwater ecosystem degradation.
A household that generates its own electricity and imports all its food from that system has addressed a modest fraction of its ecological footprint.
What "edible architecture" means here
It is not a metaphor and it is not landscaping.
It means the building itself produces food — that the greenhouse which heats the house also feeds it, that the greywater which would otherwise be waste grows the plants, that the thermal mass wall which stabilises the temperature is also the warmest growing bed on the property. The same material decision does both jobs. That is the whole idea, and Part D is where it lives.
A note on scope
This course teaches the systems. It is not a codes course.
Food production touches regulation in several places — greywater definitions, backyard poultry, livestock, selling produce, culturing fish. Those rules differ by state and county and they change, and a course that tried to carry them all would be out of date before it was published and wrong outside New Mexico on the day it was.
Where a regulatory question is genuinely part of understanding a system, it is named briefly and the student is pointed at Course 2, which is the permits and codes course and teaches how to establish the rules for your own jurisdiction. Everything else here is about how the thing works.
Course structure
| Part | Lessons | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| A | 1–3 | Food as a building system |
| B | 4–6 | Soil |
| C | 7–10 | Designing the landscape |
| D | 11–15 | Edible architecture — the building itself |
| E | 16–18 | The food forest |
| F | 19–21 | Animals |
| G | 22–23 | Aquaponics |
| H | 24–25 | Community and integration |
| — | A1–A7 | Appendices: calendars, species tables, rule summary, specifications, glossary |
The public page for this course has the same syllabus without your progress on it - that is the one to send to somebody else.