"Belongs to the Field" Social Pilot: From Wasteful Disconnects to Soil Connectivity in Hong Kong

Producer: Joshua Wolper, Shutterleaf Productions

Film synopsis:
Healthy soils are vital for delivering food, water, and air, yet current systemic disconnects prevent urban dwellers from replenishing our biophysical foundation. Together with a food localization platform, we were looking to explore localized responses to mounting food waste, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Following the spirit of 'service by mutuality,' we established from 2021 to 2023 a Social Pilot involving a hotel, a food retailer, a design school, and an organic farm for regenerating local soils with our organic waste. Adopting climate-aware farming techniques, we trained hotel staff, retailer subscribers, and volunteers (including design students) carefully in recovering kitchen scraps in their households using a microbial carrier material for transport of the fermented output to our farm lab toward reinvigorating soils and growing more than 40 different crops. We advanced from a situated analysis of diversities and restrictions in Hong Kong's food system to a systemic intervention shaped by mutualist ambitions, logistics, and partnerships emerging along the way. Consequently, we harnessed the food retailer’s empty back-haul trucks for getting home-pickled foodwaste from their subscribers to our farm lab. Unfortunately, we lost our farm plot in May 2023 to make way for urban development. Yet, its two-year duration, the Social Pilot set a precedent for eco-social mutuality: volunteers, including ethnic minority mothers, maintained our composting operation to enable regenerative food waste collection at scale, in turn receiving free access to land, harvest, companionship, and agricultural skills. This documentary portrays the human and nonhuman protagonists involved in this food system experimentation.