Farms Not Arms started in 2018 as an international collective working together to develop a long-term solution to the food security, climate change, and refugee crises. It started its work in Lebanon, the country with the highest percentage of refugees in the world, with the goal of building a scalable farm model that would provide sustenance through regenerative agriculture.
Working across the 3 pillars of nutrition, regeneration and social cohesion, the farm is also a community center that brings Lebanese and refugees together to grow food, learn regenerative skills and heal social divides.
The project results from multiple human-design sprints and workshops, beginning with stakeholder meetings between refugees and local communities in the Bekaa, Lebanon in summer 2018. Later, multidisciplinary expert sprints in NYC iteratively merged inputs from the two into an actionable, solutions-focused farm design.
Under the holistic, systemic food vision of Farms Not Arms, the Lebanese agricultural system achieve would self-sufficiency, and feed all Lebanese and refugees using only 3% of land.