A prototype for change: Heenat Salma Farm’s mission to inspire sustainable living
Heenat Salma Farm, a 50-year-old site, aims to promote organic farming, ecological practices, and natural architecture while fostering community engagement through educational and cultural programs that advance environmental awareness.
Your website refers to Heenat Salma Farm as a “prototype.” What does it represent as a prototype, and in what ways and locations could this model be replicated or scaled?
Fahad Al-Attiyah:
“The dry lands is home for 2 billion people and it is critical that they apply methods and practices that allow them to adapt and grow sustainably especially in the areas pertaining to agriculture, architecture, urbanization, and ecological management. It is therefore important to offer a model that can act as a reference to other countries facing similar challenges. We run research, experiments, and engage with a wide range of people who have traditional knowledge in the ancient proven and tested sustainable methods to revitalize them and document them and share them with the world for the benefit to be shared.”
“Learning comes in many different ways, one of them is when people engage with the concept directly and start to feel it an intuitive level. So the farm is open to all age groups and different backgrounds as everyone should be able to be an agent for positive change. We offer products, experiences, programmes, and services all aimed at embracing the values of sustainability from it’s inception. The public therefore start to engage and hopefully act as positive agendas for change.”
“Creativity and craftsmanship is the bed rock of all of our practices, and we extend it virtually to all manifestions at the Farm. The field of water harvesting is an interesting field we wish to explore as well as natural storage systems and passive cooling technology. Additionally education and vocational pedagogical approaches that would inspire more engagement form the community is key to develop to park knowledge and skills.”
