The Discover Best Practice Farming for a Sustainable 2050 Course is based on a clear vision: imagine best practice farming for 2050, start to implement these strategies now, all the while making sure it will still be profitable. At UWA we're doing just that with the Future Farm 2050 Project, set on a mixed-enterprise farm in Western Australia and we want you to learn how it can be done in your part of the world. Although this course is based on agriculture, it's not only about farming. It is a multi-disciplinary course that addresses a wide range of issues confronting the industry, including rural communities, rural infrastructure and conservation of biodiversity in agriculture. By completing this course you will understand that feeding and clothing the planet requires a multi-disciplinary approach and upon completion you will be able to explain best practices of sustainable farming and apply them in new contexts.
Mr Patrick Beale: Rural Infrastructure
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From the course by University of Western Australia
Discover Best Practice Farming for a Sustainable 2050
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From the lesson
People and Infrastructure
Welcome to Week 6 of "Discover Best Practice Farming for a Sustainable 2050". This week you'll be introduced to the importance of People and Infrastructure for sustainable agriculture. People in regional areas face many different challenges to those residing in urban areas. The changing environment has further increased these challenges. In addition, infrastructure in regional areas is expensive to build and often not "Fit for Purpose"
Meet the Instructors
Graeme MartinProfessor
School of Agriculture and Environment
Hello. My name is Patrick Beale, and I'm an architect.
I studied in London, and I've worked in Europe,
the Middle East, North America,
and for the last 20 years in Australia.
Working in these diverse situations,
as both a practitioner and as a teacher,
has allowed me to observe a lot of different ways in which people
think about and occupy the houses they live in.
So, what are the conditions that we encounter at Ridgefield Farm in Pingelly that demand
a different kind of response in the way we go about
designing and delivering a building to this rural community?
Pingelly is a minimum of two hours drive from Perth Metro,
and there is no building industry there.
The community and those surrounding communities are together simply
not big enough to sustain a professional building company.
So, builders have to come from Perth.
Typically, this will add a substantial premium to
the cost of getting any serious building work done.
A premium of over 20 percent is not uncommon.
And the more unusual the building is,
the higher the premium will be.
People who live in rural areas are not usually
20 percent wealthier than their counterparts in the city,
so good quality new building is often prohibited through cost of land.
People live to a different rhythm in the country,
by day and by season.
And so, their houses need to be able to respond to
this and importantly respond positively to the climate.
Shade from the relentless Australian sun and sheltered from
the occasional deluge in the winter plays a larger factor in the country,
and it appears, too, in the city.
At Pingelly, the solution that we adopted to the issue of
building costs was to prefabricate the building in
modules in Perth and ship it to Pingelly to
be assembled and completed on the site we had identified.
By doing this, we avoided inflated labor costs in the fabrication.
We also design the building in timber as a lightweight,
user-friendly, fully sustainable and renewable structural material.
To deal with the climate,
the most important thing we did was to give the building a very big roof,
so as to shade the walls and windows from direct sunlight,
so the interior of the house did not heat up in
the summer months when temperatures can rise above 40 degree Celsius.
We planned the building for easy cross ventilation,
so it would take advantage of the breezes and cool quickly in the evenings.
And we had a generous outdoor shaded living areas.
Another fundamental of building in the country is establishing the site.
This is where two factors are really important;
local knowledge and keen observation of local conditions.
Wind, micro climates and the lay of the land.
The right side will feel right.
In the case of the Ridgefield farmhouse,
we cited the building to the west of a breakaway or rocky outcrop of remnant bush land to
protect the house from the worst of
the hot easterly winds that blow off the desert interior throughout the summer,
bringing dust, pollens and the searing dry heat.
This site is on a slope,
running down from a high crest to the south towards the north,
and the house is sighted some distance below the crest of the slope, again,
to protect it from the Antarctic blasts
that come through from the South during the winter.
The Panorama is to the North and the West.
The house is self-sufficient in water.
We've installed two 190,000
liter of water tanks fed from the catchment on the roof of the house.
50 thousand liters of this is reserved for firefighting in the case of emergency.
We've also installed a 10-kilowatt solar array,
which is sufficient to power the house under most conditions,
with backup only being required in extreme weather events.
This image that you've seen at the start of
this talk is of a very simple prefabricated building.
It is over 100 years old.
It is sheer as accommodation from
a sheep station about a thousand kilometers north of Perth.
When I came across the buildings, 20 years ago,
I was surprised to find that it had been moved three times,
from station to station,
over the course of its lifespan.
Why would you bother to move a building like this?
Well, quite simply for the same reasons that we applied to the Ridgefield farmhouse.
It was fit for its purpose or functionally efficient.
It was constructed from rugged lightweight materials.
It was adoptable to uses of workshop and store when the shares were not in residence.
And, it appears to sit down well in
its landscape setting with its deep verandas and spreading profile.
It is now being adapted for tourist accommodation.
No beauty, but clearly a valued survivor.
No building will survive long if it is not fit for its purpose.
Those purposes change as times change.
And so, adaptability is a key characteristic of
function efficient and sustainable architecture.
These images come from all around the world.
They're examples of the vernacular or
traditional buildings that have evolved over time to suit the climate,
the landscape and the activities of the people who use them.
You can research more about the architecture of each of
these region from the references at the end of this section.
Some have adapted to contemporary life more efficiently than others.
But each of these buildings,
and there are many, many more,
contained valuable lessons about suitability to climate,
sustainable materials, and most of them about adaptability.
However, the vernacular alone is not a recipe for contemporary architecture,
but it is conceptually valuable source material.
We must update our design in construction processes to suit the contemporary world.
Over the past decade,
my studio has spent some time researching how we
might design and deliver climate appropriate,
cost-effective and adaptable buildings,
housing and larger structures to the rural and remote communities of Western Australia.
The House of Ridgefield was one of these prototypes.
Now, the mining industry is significant in Western Australia and
has driven the need for temporary accommodation at many remote mine sites.
The typical solution has been to use
standard transportable buildings with the dimension to the length and width of a truck.
Ironically, these same basic units are all that
is available in most rural areas for housing.
The standard is not high,
the planning restricted, and the thermal performance is abysmal.
In our projects, rather than they ship a lot of
air in transporting a fully finished building,
we determined to design a flat pack system using
prefabricated panels and joinery components
that did not require skilled tradesmen to assemble.
We looked at a number of products available around the world,
most of which rely on highly processed materials and sophisticated assembly techniques.
Rather than use these products that required special skills to
assemble and yet further special skills and materials for proper maintenance,
we decided to design a user-friendly template panel for simplicity and ease of assembly.
This house was designed for maximum climate effectiveness.
Hence, the deep projecting northerly roof,
which shades the whole of the elevation in the summer,
while in the winter allows for maximum solar penetration to the interior.
The roof and walls are insulated sandwich panels,
and the building sits on a concrete plinth, which is, of course,
fully shaded from solar warming and assist in
maintaining a constant temperature year-round.
The next building, it's further evolved and is fully flat packed,
and is based on a flexible and simple timber-based panel system.
The press that we made the panels on can fabricate
these panels up to seven-and-a-half meters in length
and 1.2 meters in width and in various depths for structural purposes to create wall,
floor and up a floor panels simultaneously.
The panels and all other elements of this building are very user-friendly.
They're lightweight for handling,
and they're easy to assemble.
The primary material in the structure is timber,
the insulation is felted sheep's wool,
and the floor is a hard wood strip.
The roof is a lightweight timber truss system with no reach,
and is clad with single sheets of corrugated iron spanning from one eve to the other,
and thus there are no flashings.
It stands like the Ridgefield house on stilts with stumps,
frees of assembly, and of course to ensure good air circulation.
Like the Ridgefield house,
all of the finishes are designed,
so the re-coating or maintenance work required only needs
the application of another coat without further preparation.
We referred to this methodology of philosophy of design as "appropriate technology."
We are confident that the buildings can be taken care of by
their owners or users as time goes by.
A friend once said to me that he thought a good measure of sustainability,
was to make a building so well.
That people liked it enough to look after it and to maintain it.
Now, this could be a good general definition,
but there are other more pragmatic and finite methods by which we can
evaluate a properly sustainable building of any kind,
as well as considering its credentials in terms of climate preparedness,
functionality and general fitness for purpose.
Much of this is apparently codified in various bureaucratic processes,
but the fundamentals of using
renewable materials and designing buildings with low embedded energy,
a small carbon footprint and for energy efficiency are often overlooked.
Our renewable materials are not the same as recyclable materials.
Concrete, steel, and aluminum can all be reused or recycled in some way,
but usually with a further round of energy intensive processing.
Timberline can be considered as a truly renewable material.
Trees grow, and depending on the species and where they are grown,
can be harvested between 25 and 75 year intervals.
Very little input from industrial processes.
Whether used in its raw form or in processed or engineered form,
material retains its fundamental characteristics of strength,
flexibility and durability, and is generally user-friendly.
Importantly, for large buildings,
engineered timbers have predictable and consistent strength properties and behaviors.
In our studio, we've explored the potential for using
engineered timber in large structures
on the farm for animal facilities and for general farm uses.
Typically, these projects adopted a form that was appropriate to
the construction method comprising long clear spanning members in shell or dome format.
Constructed from short lines of timber,
these structures are rapidly assembled on site,
having been prepared in the factory on
sophisticated computer-driven carpentry centers
where every screw hole drilled and numbered,
so the assembly process is close to foolproof.
The South Hedland Performance Shell that we completed in
2013 was erected in five days by three men,
three days for the timber assembly and two days to install the membrane.
At Pingelly we've been working closely with the shire
over the past two-and-a-half years to
design an ambitious new 3,000 square meter recreation and cultural center.
This project, too, will be prefabricated from our digital models,
ship two-and-a-half thousand kilometers from Melbourne and assembled on site.
In this way, a very large part of the construction will be undertaken in
factory conditions where quality is easily controlled.
The construction crew will spend a minimum of time on site.
Costs will be kept low.
And the building will be completed in
a much shorter time frame in a conventional construction system we use.
So, today we've covered the need for an alternative paradigm for building in the country,
typical design responses to dealing with extreme climates,
the concepts of buildings that are fit for their purpose,
modular and flat pack houses,
about houses and components,
prefabrication of simple and complex structures,
the properties of timber as
a structural material and some meanings of sustainability and buildings. Thank you.
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