Growers Without Borders: Community and Remote Sensing of Encounters with Nature

This paper studies the benefits of a collective remote sensing method in the context of Growers Without Borders, an eco-social farm in Hong Kong. The farm was a collaborative effort of a design school and a hotel association to develop methods for recycling compost and food waste. Researchers recruited volunteers and asked them to sign in to a WhatsApp group. The group provided the researchers an opportunity to understand the volunteers when they were working on the farm and encountered issues they would not have faced in their city life. This paper describes encounters with plants, critters, and soil to show how these methods gave geographically dispersed participants and researchers access to the farm and its activities.