Protura is an open-platform to create and share regenerative polycultural strategies to collectively develop and manage rural and urban community farming initiatives. A botanical library linked to mapping, design and operational tools catalyzes both new and existing projects. It enables a collective digital web between practice and theory beyond physical borders. Protura helps weave local domestic and landscape habitat in sustainable symbiosis for thriving global diversity. # protura.xyz
Cross-border/international
Netherlands
Italy
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Portugal
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It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
As an individual in partnership with other persons
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Protura is an open digital platform to develop and manage urban and rural community farming projects. As a user-based web-application it is used to create, collect and share regenerative strategies to develop polycultural ecosystems. Digitally interconnected tools and databases support the organization to manage project resources and tasks successfully over time.
The Protura platform consists of two main parts. The first part allows the user to create a detailed layered map as an overview of the development plan. Plant species or cultivars optimal for their conditions can then be chosen from a user-supported database. Existing conditions, observations and insights can be combined with web-based GIS and computational models to accurately position polycultures according to geo-climate. Over time, users can contribute to the database with own empirical plant knowledge, linked to their project on the map.
In the second part mapped information of the project can be extended to schedule and manage activities such as planting, weeding, pruning and harvesting of plant species in a calendar. Community members are assigned to these activities on the calendar, ensuring that everyone has the same overview of the project planning. The platform also makes it easy to register harvests, contains an inventory system and can log the amount of produce sold and when, providing an exact overview of the financial situation of the project.
The overall mission is to catalyze the development of an increasing number of regenerative ecosystem-based farming projects with an open platform that accounts for social and financial sustainability, according to geo-climate conditions and plant-guild choices. Protura provides an alternative to monocultural agrobusiness which is known to cause biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and food-supply vulnerability. It parallelly addresses climate-change and geo-politics and people’s disconnection from their sources of food as a key life resource.
Community
Regenerative
Landscape
Farming
Platform
Protura seeks reconnection with nature through sustainable farming projects and aims in essence for a thriving biodiversity. As we enable the development and management of diverse synergetic plant-combinations we catalyse community landscape practices towards ecosystem regeneration. We seek this mission on three complementary levels and pursue an objective for each.
On a strategic planning level we aim to catalyze development with open-source strategy steps. Our database of edible and useful plants combines individual conditional data such as suitable climate, soil-types, companions and foes, growth and maintenance into strategies. For this we actively seek, collect and reference projects and relate research into a visually translated hard knowledge of regenerative practices. Plants can already be positioned and mapped with our early GIS mapping features.
On a practical operational level we aim to enable shared management of farming projects and increase regenerative capacities between communities and local plants. Protura has already implemented tools to share inventories, manage resources and finances, collectively organize and manage tasks over time linked to the project site.
On a social level we aim to create an open and lively-community as an exchange network. Our platform sharing features already enable on-going farmers and garden-enthusiasts to start mutually building a digital pool of hard and soft knowledge, as valuable experiences, challenges and learnings. Beyond border potential adherents can start with stronger conceptual bases and become part of a web of contacts and exemplary projects in a regenerative transition.
Protura’s community knowledge powered by tailored digital tools create the two Protura elements. In synergy these innovatively showcase how digital systems enable organization and knowledge transfer to perpetuate social agency towards regeneration.
One of our goals is to improve the aesthetic and emotional experience of people through planted landscapes that mimic natural ecosystems and bring them closer to the wonders of nature, a much-needed panacea in the current highly artificial and monotonous developments around us.
Protura aims to foster natural beauty in both rural and urban spaces. In cities, and also increasingly in rural areas, biodiversity is limited, often isolated and barely growing to its full potential. We enable plant-life longevity and social contact by fostering companionship networks to resemble natural ecosystems. Protura’s elements enable citizens to transform or develop public gardens and parks into diverse landscapes, allowing more access to beautiful forest environments. The higher plant diversity attracts greater bird, bee and insect variety and slowly also restore endangered species.
In parallel, as the beauty of such spaces increases with interconnection, so does the potential for life-sustaining resources. The development and management of green spaces which Protura enables aim to locally increase resilience and quality of food supply improving people’s experience of their lives. As the capacity of the ecosystem to provide resources increases, consumers are more attracted by the beauty of local farming projects and thus come closer to food sources, supporting emotional fulfilment and health. This allows people to develop a positive and regenerative culture in their surroundings in the longer term. These qualities are typically absent in today’s food network which is measured quantitatively and controlled centrally.
Conclusively, Protura elements create a space to transform the idea of farming into a healthy, much-needed aesthetical craft to be cultivated in the lives of people, maintaining relational balance between urban and rural areas. The concept has an exemplary holistic and creative approach to re-establishing the connection to the earth and nature.
Protura aims to increase social food rights by empowering green citizen-led organizations and networks to promote diversity and interconnection. In an exemplary parallel approach the concept addresses biodiversity issues and related social issues, such as decreased affordability for a diverse diet with good quality, but also increased fragmentation and polarisation of society.
On the one hand, Protura aims for an open framework to regrow biodiversity, bring food sources closer and cultivate higher grassroot-level agency over dietary and biodiversity practices. Following an open-source ethos, it is free and, thus, affordable for all. In this way, the concept aims to slowly offer alternative access and mitigate restrictions on affordability for healthy food. On the long-term, Protura aims to reverse perpetual downward cycles by neutralising the externalised environmental and social health costs of monocultural agro-business. All together, this offers a more affordable, organic and nutritious dietary balance for all.
On the other hand, growing food empowers and restores access to partly lost knowledge from the layman level to corporate and governmental levels through global processes. In communities of practice people connect with each-other and feel united on common ground. For new arrivals seeking new homes or side-lined individuals, such public landscapes are vital to shape initial contacts, allow emotional integration and regain a sense of belonging via familiar connections. Finally, Protura fosters spaces of inter-generational contact, multi-cultural exchange beyond financial and educational background, which are essential in an emotionally healthy, well-integrated and mutualist society.
Conclusively, the elements of Protura have an incredible potential to help even out value-imbalances and in simple ways create civic and environmentally inclusive grounds that close the gaps between nature and society, and also within society itself.
The concept of Protura was partly inspired by an existing network of gardens in the city where we live, with the wish for more food and health sovereignty. According to people actively involved in these edible gardens, their regular activities with plants provides them with a wide variety of emotional, mental and physical benefits.
In a city, individuals with diverse backgrounds often feel isolated in a huge crowded physical space that offers little opportunity for social contact without financial demands. Participation in public social life is increasingly out of budget for many people but community gardens provide this opportunity with just one’s presence and willingness.
These edible and healing gardens gardens create an oasis for animals, insects and humans seeking refuge from our domination-based post-colonial and industrialized landscapes such as the increasingly alienated environment we call ‘home’. For example, in the context of the covid pandemic, these gardens acted as shelter for mental and physical health by enabling social contact while almost all other public places were forcibly closed for months.
Additionally, simple and collaborative physical activity to different degrees of effort allows people of different ages to participate to their respective capabilities and toleration levels. A lot of spontaneous cultural exchange happens while people get tasks done together. Informal and natural conversations in such environments play a tremendous role in integration and reconstruction of status-quo concepts or views while enabling friendships to develop.
Finally, as Protura catalysis these fertile environments it amplifies the creation of a resilient, local socio-ecological system along the gradient of urban and rural landscape. This concept has a tremendous potential for regenerating and sustaining the health of civil society.
Our collaboration started two years ago at a garden in the city of Rotterdam. We gained hands-on experience in growing edible plants using organic farming methods. Protura as an idea grew organically through the need for a tool that supports small-scale, alternative farming projects.
Rotterdam has a number of small organizations that start and manage such gardens. GroenGoed is a foundation running ten other gardens, which we frequent. Soon three more gardens will start, for which we intend to use Protura as a design and management tool. De GroeneConnectie and Cooperatie Ondergrond are other foundations with their own garden network in Rotterdam keen on using Protura.
On the regional level we have three testing partners. Voedselbos Vlaardingen is an organisation using “food forest” principles to produce food for local consumers and restaurants. They will use Protura to get a clearer overview of their plants on their site. Similarly, Janmiekeshoeve is a farm transforming its multi-generational dairy farm into a food forest and will use Protura to design the forest and track the activities on the farm. The platform will also be used to track harvests and sales by Boeregoed, a foundation that supplies local food to Naaldwijk.
On the European level we are working with two partners. In Portugal, Quinta dos Sarilhos is a two-hectare farm near the city of Coimbra which uses Protura to develop its regenerative ambitions. It currently has a variety of vegetables, olives, chickens and sheep, but needs an ecological resilience plan to counter the consequences of the surrounding eucalyptus monoculture. In Italy, Casa Modero is an initiative that combines the hospitality sector and the slow food initiative. They guests with local products from farmers in the area and produce from their own garden which Protura will help with.
Protura is ideal for such initiatives that are playing a tremendously important role in sustaining a connection between the city and nature.
We in the Protura team come with diverse backgrounds and experiences from three to five different countries. The platform as a project is an intersection of information technology, agriculture, architectural design, computational design and climate consultancy. Through our interactions emerged the possibility to create a bridge between digital and socio-ecological development.
Our IT developer was initially working on creating software for greenhouse technology but soon realised that there lay a much important and richer application of his IT knowledge and passion for and experience in farming. Meanwhile, we have an architect with applied experience in computational design and a passionate knowledge of plants. Our team also includes an architect who is experienced in hands-on construction work, earth architecture, climate consultancy for buildings and cities and a working knowledge of plants through regular participation in urban and rural communities. Our architecture knowledge made it clear that a mapping or visual planning tool is an essential feature of the platform and our practical experience in farming and community-work underpinned the necessity of farm-management tools.
In order to develop our idea and platform, we have also had invaluable inputs from core members of green initiatives in Rotterdam. These are all people who have dedicated many years in setting up and managing urban and rural communities, active green spaces, farms and food forests. They are highly valuable contributors of practical information, long-term practicable ideas and working knowledge of plants, soil and even weather patterns. This information exchange means that Protura is inherently a socially-developed tool, and aims to return far more value to socio-ecological farming communities.
Our idea of Protura as a platform for small-scale diverse edible gardens and farms came about while setting up and participating in some garden projects in our city. A small-scale farm project that aims to maximize biodiversity and the diversity of edibles in general requires a vast database of plants that are specific to its local environment, climate zone, microclimate, availability of rainfall on a monthly basis, soil type on land, slope of land, etc. Currently available open-source databases are usually limited to one particular climate-zone, or one country or region, usually developed on the basis of one group’s experience on their farm or a group of farms, or on the basis of various other research, all of which is still very limited in scope. Farm planning and organisation tools for large farms are available but of limited possibility for diversity and usually beyond the financial means of non-corporate farmers.
Additionally, extracting information from such a database is a very tedious process since plant-information is highly multi-faceted. Cultivars and species are often given local names, making it difficult to adapt the information confidently. This leads to the idea that monoculture or a highly simplified method of planting in rows is the only way to farm, precluding the potential of all the available data about plant diversity and its socio-ecological impact. Moreover, currently available tools for small-scale farming projects are of limited use due to their having incomplete databases and inactive members.
Protura further increases the value of its database by relating it to farm-planning through mapping and organisational functions. This streamlines the knowledge and decision-making steps that a farm requires so that community members learn faster and deepen their experience in the enriching task of working with plants, enjoying produce and sustaining social networks.
Protura is made to share and transfer knowledge openly between communities. It is, in essence, applicable to other places, beneficiaries and contexts. It provides organised information on planting systems and guilds, harvest methods, ‘hugel’ constructions, greenhouse designs, composting systems and constructions, to state a few examples. These are based on tried and tested experiences from ourselves and the community that will come to use Protura together. Projects can be set up with one or multiple moderators which allows a one-step control of the information flow to maintain some credibility of the open-source feature.
In this manner, we see Protura as informative and educational for hands-on skills and project development, especially for people and groups with little experience in these topics. In any case, such learning comes with experience, and Protura provides at least the necessary starting points as guidelines.
Apart from establishing a vast knowledge base for farming, Protura features planning tools that the user can choose to adapt to their project needs. It offers functionalities that are basic requirements for alternative farming projects, our having learnt this by experience in various situations and hearing similar stories from other small-scale farmers. Protura has a unique mapping feature that allows the user to draw the layout of their farm, and correlate these to the database. Tasks related to these plants are then organised and assigned to the relevant people or groups. Since such planning varies from farm to farm, such functions of Protura still remain editable to a large extent.
Finally, a harvest log allows the user to keep track of the quantity and type of plant harvest each season. Based on this they could predict the produce and resulting profit for various scenarios and plan for the coming years.
Protura as a platform has come about as a part of an answer to global problems that are well-known in the modern world and affect the lives of people everywhere on a daily basis. Protura primarily targets problems caused by unsustainable farming practices which are based on monoculture and profit, largely ignoring socio-ecological needs. These problems are set-off in the form of a domino-effect so large that it is difficult to clearly pinpoint a linear relationship between global problems and their corresponding local manifestations. Still, it has been scientifically underpinned that monocultural farming practices have led to a collapse of the earth’s biodiversity, increased greenhouse gas emissions and contributed to the vulnerability of local groups by breaking their relationship with their land, sometimes by literal forced displacement.
In spite of monocultural farming being profitable until now, farming as a profession is less and less desired and valued across the world. The profession is associated with low quality of life, unstable incomes, unpredictable harvest due to changing seasonal patterns and a generally difficult and physically stressful lifestyle. This is a problem in itself since this perception will eventually tear humans completely away from land, the source of all our key resources, including food.
Protura prioritises plant-diversity which is not only beneficial for people’s diets and the ecology, but also helps create a much more resilient landscape in the face of unpredictable climate patterns. Protura hopes to help transform the current cycle of unsustainable farming and biodiversity collapse into a cycle of long-term sustained gains for humans and the rest of the natural environment that is resilient by being decentralized and locally organised. On the social front, it has the potential to mitigate polarization and encourage empathy and acceptance, leading to peace and cultural progress in a diverse society.
