I am fascinated by Li Edelkoort and have been for a long time now – a trend forcaster, educator, curator and publisher – she links the worlds of art, fashion, design and consumer culture. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation on Edelkoort and her work at Trend Union and learn about her process of observing and discovering trends. Edelkoort’s ability to sense what’s “in the air” captivates me and I find myself inspired by her ideas. She publishes three trend forecasting magazines – View On Colour, InView and Bloom – all of which are highly significant in the creative industries and recently launched her blog – Trend Tablet. Below is an excerpt from the Trend Tablet post “Farm Of The Furture, From 2010 – 2050 Or Beyond” where she discusses the growing importance that farming and the agricultural community will have on our lives – now and in the coming years. I have been feeling a strong undercurrent of this trend and I’m excited to see it unfold.

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Welcome to the 21^stcentury!

Recognizing at last a truly new timeframe in which everything will be different for the years to come, with each aspect of our lives converting to green, inspired by the way nature functions and how life on the farm evolves.

The agricultural community will become the planet’s new elite, dominating our essential needs and inspiring years of farmer styles. After all, the farmers of the future will clothe us, house us, feed us, fuel us and hopefully even heal us. Ultimately they will be able to engineer design and grow furniture in a symbiosis of technology and biology, and therefore rural and urban lifestyles will merge and become one; resulting in an inversed social landscape with a greener city and a more contemporary countryside.

We will see vertical farming in the inner cities (as currently studied by Columbia University) and the return of smaller luxury farms in the countryside to handle the market for fresh niche products, while arid areas of the globe will be used to power solar plants and farm new kinds of bio fuels.

The farm will even become a destination for beauty and learning as well as a cradle for new retail strategies for the future.

Design and lifestyle will interpret rural classics and invent a farming future with all ideas and gestures taken from the culture of agriculture: seeding, growing, gardening, landscaping, pollinating, hybridization, harvesting, foresting and the breeding of animals and unknown species.

Strangely enough, the result is a truly avant-garde mission stretching far into the future, with landscaped floors, abstract seating, spheric objects, molecular lighting and robotic hybrids, far from the back-to-the-roots countrified movement of the last century. This is not a romantic escapist revival but an essential survival spirit running fast towards a brand new future.

In a remarkable and unforeseen reversal of history and after the industrialization and virtualization periods of progress the world will return unconditionally to cultivating what will be the most rare and cherished; earth!

- Li Edelkoort via Trend Tablet

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