Jonathan Minchin, NGM interview
"Data is not information, information is not wisdom, and wisdom is not practice."
Interview host: Shih Wei Chieh
2022.11.22
Fablab Taipei

Can you tell us about the ROMI Project and what kind of network you are forming with digital tools?
ROMI is a project robotics for microfarms and it was part of an European funding project. So it's actually led by IAAC which is the Institute for Advanced Architecture in Catalonia. And then there are other partners like Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Inria in France, that's the National research in plant science, and then there's Humboldt University as well, which is in Berlin. There are other partners, smaller ones, like farms and administrative partners, and a very specialist type of plant biology called CNRS, which is also French. So we all got together as these institutions and wrote a project which was then funded by the European Commission. So I wrote that project and participated in its funding call - to fund the green Fablab, which was associated to the Fablab Barcelona, and all of the other Fablabs in Barcelona. But it was at the Valldaura campus, which is up in the hills just outside of Barcelona. So in many ways the project was created to work with very small scale farms and we had a very small scale farm at Valldaura. So we wrote it to fund the farm essentially, and create projects around our existence there. So in one way the community was ourselves because I was living and working at Valldaura. I coordinated that campus for some time, maybe six years. And so within the campus of Valldaura we created ROMI project, one about beehives, other lessons and classes that taught design, biology, agro ecology, permaculture, as well as carpentry and forestry, and just going out into the 140 hectares of that site, and mapping it so that it was really trying to connect biology, ecology, agrology, in that order, finally, to materials and digital fabrication. So that was the sort of essence of what we were trying to do as a community of researchers and students.

How people gathered together in the beginning in your project?
I think we had this shared concept, so it didn't matter if there's a biologist or an engineer or an artist or a beekeeper, we all have a shared idea of being as sustainable as possible. So that's a term which is an old term but it has longevity and still are working towards sustainable development. And this means really looking at self-sufficiency in that rural setting and being very closely connected to the context of the site, and working in loops, cycles of materials and nutrients. So trying to form ways of design which are actually systemic rather than product-based, you don't design products you design systems. And your interventions as a creative person, or a biologist, or an engineer should somehow improve the health of that system of the habitat, or yourself or your community, or all three at the same time. So that's the driving concept and then projects were born out of that like using DIY easy to assemble modular cheek robotics that would allow people to support menial simple tasks, repetitive tasks in a farming environment, but also allow for a more complex agriculture. That's the aim anyway, whether we achieved that or not is yet to be seen. But the idea was to use accessible tools, the power of computation to support complex systems.

Since it is a huge project, what is the structure of it? Is there any hierarchical issue from it?
Yeah, that's a very interesting and in some ways a difficult question, because IAAC itself in Catalonia in some ways was quite anarchic, so a lot of people would do essentially what they wanted to do, so it was a very free environment and often these projects evolved and emerged out of that basis. So particularly for me, an example of that - when I met synthetic biologists, somebody who's thinking a bit like a designer, and sitting next to an engineer, and me as a machinist, projects literally just emerged through conversation. So that's very nice, but at the same time, there is a hierarchy, and there are people who would take credit for the work that emerges and use that to benefit the whole institution, or brand that to look like it's a particular thing. But often these people were just working students emerging with projects that then got branded to be something else. But that also gave these projects some extra power and sometimes abilities to scale the projects or reach a bigger audience. So there was this anarchy based level of researchers and artists playing but then there was a hierarchy of branding which I wasn't so happy with. Within the institute there would be different departments that would have their own communications.

Can you briefly talk about your vision for science and research and how science research can collaborate with local communities?
Very good question and actually what I was speaking about before was the place that these projects, the community, and the place that these projects arose from, but the projects themselves are the most interesting. So ROMI was a four and a half year research project where actually we weren't asked by the European Commission to engage with communities, because we had to build these things on the farms, so we are the community. But now we've developed the tools to start to work with different people. So within the digital fabrication you can share the files online, you can connect with people remotely, and especially when they share the same tools, you can really start to customize and change in about the files that you've made to share, so these things are open source. So we designed everything in a way to be shared. And then on the website, on the platform – there are ways to learn, there are classes online, we teach people , it's open courseware, soon there will be a forum so people can interact in their own way themselves. But the idea is that they should be empowered to create the things that they want and customize them. If I take the example of where I live now, I'm building some of these tools in a village with the farmers, in Benefayette, which is the South of Catalonia. So I have a 10 hectare farm down there and a lab to do research and fun things, the same concept. So those farmers have problems, one of the first is that the tools, the machines and the processes that they use are very dependent on big heavy tractors, diesel-powered, and we are proposing very light weight, small, but very complex tools, so there's a shift in technology transfer. They're not used to it. But at the same time they want these tools, because they see the problems happening in agriculture. But also the second aspect of this is there's a generational difference. So all over Spain, people are leaving their farms, they are selling them, abandoning them and villages are shrinking, and often the younger generations are leaving and they don't come back. So that rural shrinkage is tied to the problems with agriculture. But the young people are interested in robotics, in computers, in Arduinos, in new ways of agriculture. So they are the ones who are interested. This is why we've created this system of robotics, not as a solution but as something to be customized and changed. So as we begin to work with this new generation of young farmers, they see things that we don't know. But we can help them facilitate their own ideas. So it's trial and error, and we all learn together because every farm is different. Every person is different.

How can the old generation learn from the new or how do we learn from each other? How to create an equal position within these exchanges?
This is generically termed as ‘take up’. But in my experience what this really means is just doing it, it’s practice. So you can have the data, you can have the information, you can have the technology, you can have the wisdom, but actually it's none of those things, it's just practice, it's doing it. So being out on the farm with a farmer. That's everything, it's experience. So wisdom is not practice. We need to do. After many many years of working in different contexts, I'm not trying to impart anything, I'm just trying to do, and that's learning by doing. Data is not information, information is not wisdom, and wisdom is not practice, you've got to do it. So over many years of working in Valldaura, I was mapping what I was doing with my time. I started to discover things like if people wanted to come and film us or do communications, or branding, social media, whatever, we have to go to the garden and we do the meeting in the garden whilst doing the weeding because we would spend 20 % of our time weeding in the gardens by hand. I like maintenance. So these small acts of constant doing, and change, and feedback. That's what I mean by doing, engaging, so that's where wisdom comes from. It's in reverse, wisdom gives information. And to answer your question of ‘How would you engage with a community?’, I think the only way to do that is by sitting down, having a cup of tea, and talking about it and doing it. Every time it's going to be different. But we have to do it.

Can you tell us the current status, like how many farms you are collaborating with, and what is the funding state?
So at this moment in time we finished the project for the European Commission in July. And then we created an association which anybody could potentially join, between all of the partners, and we created a non-profit organization around them and we haven't got any money. So now we're beginning to receive petitions for collaboration, or customization, or services or kits. So some universities have asked for kits, and that's generating some revenue. I've received collaborative suggestions from farms in Greece, in Spain, in Portugal, and also from a foundation which works all over Catalonia, and I'm here in Taiwan trying to do the same thing, to collaborate. But it's the farms in Spain and France which are starting to emerge more. But we need some funding to give us the push to be able to start creating real services. So we've designed these Robotic platform tools to be as cheap as possible. So a farmer usually would not hesitate to buy a tractor for 50, 150 thousand Euros or more, some of them are, half a million in the United States. Ours cost 5000 or less, and they're made with commonly found components like wheelchair wheels and motors, Arduinos, plastic pieces extruded at aluminum, things that can be replaced, so they're super cheap. Farmers are asking for them, but we currently don't have the means to employ somebody just to do that. The farms in France which are connected to Sony Computer Science Laboratory have been running these tools, and those tools have been developed with them, by them, for the past 3 years I would say.

Do you ever get profits from the crops with the tools?
We've shown that if you use the Rover (weeding bot), it reduces the need for weeding. So that means that you regain 20 % of your time. So that's quite an impact for a small-scale farm.

For the design part, are you open for other people to join the design task?
So I'm doing that essentially in Benefayette with my local farm. These tools are for organic vegetable farms, it’s crops like lettuces and cabbages and peppers, but it's a mix. We encourage polyculture farming, so usually on a small scale farm it's already a polyculture, so this is a market garden - they would have lots of lots of different crops, all planted, all at the same time, intensively, packed quite close, and then those when they're ready, when they're harvested, they are constantly planting and harvesting, those would then go to local markets - rather than Monocultures, which is a single crop. So that's the aim. It's actually to work with local farmers, identifying their particular needs, particular crops and particular situations. We've discovered that if you're growing, let's say in a very simple way, lettuces and cabbages in the same plot - normally a farmer would put all of those crops in a single line and then inter-crop with lettuces. But if you're using a robotic tool, you don't have to do it in a straight line, so you can fill and pack the bed in a much more complex way and it increases your crop. So this means with two crops you could plant 10 or 15 different varieties or species altogether in a complementary pattern, which would be very difficult to deal with purely manually, but with some of the support of computer vision and robotic tools, you can deal with that. So this is following the knowledge of the farmer like traditions or experiences, which often predate industrial agriculture. Honestly, I think that's where it becomes very, very interesting because if we think of computation in that way, we can potentially go back to an older model of farming and begin to learn things. This sort of intensive, polyculture of organic vegetable farming has been done all over Europe. So when you have a polyculture, you are using one species to defend another or to feed another. And by that, by a diversity, you are also encouraging new species and interaction, and this was known, this is all old knowledge. But it means that you don't need extra fertilizers or you don't need pesticides, or so much. This is using nature to work for you rather than having to force nature. There are some instances where you need the nitrogen in the soil. So you feed the soil with the green manure. It's now commonly known that 3 sisters planting - a legume which is vertical, and then you would plant a squash which goes horizontal and covers the soil, and then you would plant beans which can go up the corn, so you would have a legume growing vertically hanging on corn, and you would have squash growing horizontally, so you would have three crops at the same time, feeding and protecting each other.

Can you talk about how you see Taiwan – the maker scene and agriculture?
Sure, I mean the tools in the ROMI project were developed on European farms. But even to me, the difference between a French farm and a Catalan one, even growing the same crops, it is massively different. Spain's a bit hotter, dryer. France is often very flat, whereas Spain is more mountainous.
So there are different traditions in people, in histories and geographies, and soils and plants. So for me to come to Taiwan, I'm seeing incredible histories and different species growing together, and that's for me a wealth of knowledge and information, and I can then play with somehow, as a creative person, I can learn from that. I wanna learn from that because it is incredible. The conditions are different. But also I think the knowledge is different as well. I think all over the world farming has a problem, agriculture has a problem. But when you start to see small scale farms, they are very innovative. And I think that we can learn from patchworks of difference and of small scale. So one major project that I'd undertaken through many years, it’s a project called Open Lab. So what I essentially tried to do was - without language, without culture, without any input, you find a location on Earth, and that gives you a set of conditions of the sun, of the soil, perhaps you're in a particular type of biome. So if I then register that type of typology, I can then find other places that share the similarity. I'm sort of programming this very slowly, and I need help. So it's using ecological indicators as drivers of technology choice or creative opportunity. So in this way you can you can tag a project with conditions and people. This was a big way to sort of explain how a project could be broken into components and those components could be reused in other projects, but also be tagged. In theory you could do analysis with this, ‘how sustainable is my component for that place’? So you can do live cycle assessment using this methodology. And then you can create systems of services, of teaching.

I was the founder of the green FabLab in Barcelona, and I coordinated the University campus there.
But I left that to set up my own group of researchers. I have a registered company in Estonia so I can then join other projects, so I am getting funded again by the European Commission for a different project. But I now work under the name Ecological Interaction. The projects that I’ve worked on,
one of them is ROMI, one of them is Open Lab, one of them is Open Source Beehives. And then there are various different... Soil Census, making mead, fermenting, and then working with olives and carrots which are the two main tree crops around me. And I think I just do these projects forever. And I also teach students Biology Zero, which is a two-week course in simple biology and concepts, seminars, online lectures. But in theory I so want to work with people in Taiwan so we can have a dry range land climate, we can have a boreal climate further North of Europe, tropical, South tropical… this becomes a network of regional difference.

How do you see the exchange part in Agriculture?
You need difference to be able to understand and integrate, and this is where inspiration comes from. I think it always works in a bi-directional manner. It's not just an abundance of different crops, but it's an abundance of different perspectives and people and cultures that I think really make the difference. And when those things are overlaid and interrupted, like an anarchic environment of researchers, biologists, artists, beekeepers, biologists, altogether, strange and wonderful things emerge. I think that this very well-known concept of thinking globally but acting locally. I understand and agree with that. But I think we should do it sort of in reverse. We should act locally, and then, share globally. But first, it's the local. Because otherwise if we take all of our information from global sources, we've actually lost the context of our day-to-day actions. So that's why I say information is not wisdom and wisdom is not practice, because we need to get our hands dirty and involved to actually have local knowledge, situated knowledge, experiential knowledge, tacit knowledge, getting our hands involved. So I think we go local, before we go global to have something valuable to share.

links from interview
https://iaac.net/project/open-source-beehives-project/
https://romi-project.eu/
https://e-estonia.com/
https://www.openlab.org/