Prototyping Fit-to-Farm Models for Biomanufacturing: Friesland
2025
The Frisian peat meadow region in the north of the Netherlands is a landscape under mounting ecological pressure. For centuries, its low-lying, nutrient-rich grasslands—shaped by both natural forces and human intervention—have supported extensive grazing and helped define Friesland’s identity as a hub of dairy farming and cow’s milk production. Today, however, drainage for agriculture is causing the soil to settle and the land to subside. Rising CO₂ emissions and declining biodiversity now threaten this unique environment, creating an urgent need to reimagine how we live and produce in balance with local ecologies.
Within this context, Prototyping Fit-to-Farm Models for Biomanufacturing: Friesland explores how the often-invisible intelligence of soil life can inform regenerative production systems and future economies for biogenic dyes in the peatland region. It envisions a modular, seasonal biofabrication lab that uses compost heat from local meadows to power biological processes. This setup could generate new revenue streams for local farms and point toward a distributed, place-based biomanufacturing model that taps into region-specific waste flows.
Weaving Soil Intelligence in Friesland’s Peatlands
Soil is among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth—home to more organisms in a single teaspoon than there are humans on the planet—yet its vitality remains largely abstract to most. As part of Veenweide Atelier: Designs for Subsiding Peatland, this project brings the unseen world of microbes into view, translating their life processes into the production of microbially dyed, locally made textiles.
Commissioned and facilitated by the Veenweide Atelier, under the artistic direction of artist and eco-social designer Henriëtte Waal, this project enabled Faber Futures to work with a network of regional partners weaving scientific research, traditional land practices, and emerging biotechnologies to imagine new forms of rural biomanufacturing rooted in place.
“Fit-to-Farm” Model for Biofabrication
This commission brings together key strands of Faber Futures’ R&D: biomaterials, design, and bioregional deployment. It explores how local organisms, farming systems, linen production, and culture can converge to create a future in which precision fermentation enables symbiotic manufacturing.
At its core, the project investigates how fermentation, powered by pigment-producing bacteria found in healthy soils and manure, can valorise agricultural waste streams on peatland farms. Developed in dialogue with Frisian farmers, microbiologists, and textile makers—including the Boon family organic dairy farm, the Research Centre Biobased Economy of the Hanze University of Applied Sciences, University of Groningen, House of Design (production of Frisian linen and development of the linen supply chain), and Agricycling Fryslân (a composting cooperative of farmers)—it envisions a more resilient, bioregionally rooted manufacturing system that is both scalable and deeply site-specific.
The result is a modular, seasonal biofabrication lab designed to operate in rhythm with the Frisian landscape, using compost heat from local meadows to drive biological processes, and flax grown on nearby clay soil as a base for silk-linen textiles. Flax has long been grown in Friesland, and efforts to revive a regenerative linen industry are now underway. While local production is still emerging, we envision how microbial dyeing can align with a fully bioregional textile system.
To tailor the lab to its environment, the Boon family’s peat meadow farm was mapped using laser scanning technology, informing a site-responsive design. As a model, it demonstrates how fit-to-scale biomanufacturing infrastructure can be seamlessly embedded in the landscape—optimised for local conditions and broader systems integration.
From Soil to Systems: Biologically Attuned Infrastructure
Presented at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, the project includes a conceptual design for a fit-to-scale bioregional fabrication lab, serving as a provocation for modular, decentralised, place-based biomanufacturing.
Alongside it, two large-scale textiles dyed with pigment-producing soil bacteria, sourced from the University of Leiden and cultivated at Hanze University of Applied Sciences, demonstrate how microbial processes can be applied to create local, low-impact colour. Through fermentation, these bacteria can dye and print textiles, such as linen grown in Friesland, with a water-efficient and non-toxic process. Together, these elements offer a systems-based vision for regenerative production, grounded in the rhythms, resources, and relationships of the Frisian peat meadow landscape.
Project Credits
Designer and Technologist
Faber Futures
Project Commissioner
Arcadia
Ecosystem Initiator & Implementation Partner
Henriëtte Waal, Artistic Director, Veenweide Atelier
Collaborators
Soil-dwelling microorganisms
Jeroen Siebring, Microbiologist, Knowledge Center of Expertise for Biobased Economy at Hanze University of Applied Sciences
Kees Boon, Organic Dairy Farmer, Boon Family Farm
Simone Larabi, Partner, Material Researcher and Product Designer, House of Design
Tess van Zalinge, Fashion Designer
Willem Bruinsma, Organic Flax Farmer, Bruinsma Farm
Photography
Tryntsje Nauta, Brecht Duijf, Faber Futures
Film
Jonathan Doornenbal; Directed and produced by Faber Futures and Veenweide Atelier