The yardfarming question, eleven years on
From the EATT Magazine archive
A 2015 conversation with Erik Assadourian, revisited
By Cullen Pope · October 2026
In 2015 I asked Erik Assadourian a blunt question: why would a sustainability researcher go into reality television?
He had spent more than thirteen years at the Worldwatch Institute, writing about how people might live within the planet’s limits. Now he was casting a TV show. Yardfarmers would follow six young Americans as they moved back in with their parents and turned the family lawn, and any neighbour’s lawn they could borrow, into food. Filming was planned for the 2016 growing season. The series was due in spring 2017.
I remember being genuinely excited by the idea. Not because reality television particularly interested me, but because I could see something in the direction of travel. We were surrounded by more technology, more convenience and more distance from the ordinary systems that kept us going, and at the same time there seemed to be a pull back towards gardens, food, useful skills and the places immediately around us. I couldn’t have told you what would drive that shift, or how large it would become. I just had a sense that there were legs in it.
The interview was done for EATT Magazine. A few weeks later the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) reposted it under both our names. You can still read it there: Futureproofing America with a Yardfarming Revolution.
This is not a verdict on whether Erik was right. Eleven years is long enough to go back to a conversation and ask better questions of it.
Follow the question
Underneath the television idea, Erik was asking something plain. What would it take for ordinary households to feed themselves a little more, and lean on distant systems a little less?
His answer had three parts.
The first was lawns. He counted 40 million acres of them in the United States, and pointed to the Victory Gardens of the Second World War as proof that yards can grow serious amounts of food.
The second was households. He wanted several generations under one roof again. He admitted that sending contestants home to their parents was one part gimmick, but said “it’s also three parts futureproofing”.
The third was a story. If reality television could make people care about almost anything, perhaps it could make them care about dinner.
What held up?
The households did. By 2021 the Pew Research Center counted nearly 60 million Americans living in multigenerational homes, about four times as many as in 1971. Financial pressures and family caregiving were among the leading reasons people gave Pew. No television show asked them to.
The worry about fragile supply held up too, sooner than anyone would have liked.
And Erik’s own habits held. In 2015 he called himself a lazy gardener who grew what grew itself and foraged the rest. In recent years he has continued foraging and led a monthly forest-bathing group in Connecticut.
What changed?
Nearly everything around the idea.
The television series imagined in 2015 never reached the screen in the form originally planned. A trailer did. The call for contestants turned up something Erik had not gone looking for: people who were already doing it. One young woman in New Jersey was farming more than an acre and a half of neighbours’ yards and town land, and helping to feed 45 families from it.
The Worldwatch Institute closed in 2017. In 2019 Erik founded the Gaian Way, a community built around living as part of the Earth. The argument moved from a television pitch to something slower.
What could nobody have seen coming?
That a virus would suddenly make part of the idea feel much less theoretical.
In the spring of 2020, with supermarket shelves emptying, people who had never grown anything went looking for seeds. Burpee, a seed company then 144 years old, said it sold more seed that March than at any time in its history. The phrase “victory garden” came back into the headlines.
Maybe that was what interested me in the first place: not whether everybody would become a farmer, but what happens when people start paying attention again to the patch of ground directly around them.
That April, Erik wrote that it was time to yardfarm. The line he had prepared for television became one he delivered in a crisis.
Nobody would have guessed which part of the project would last, either. It was not the show, and it was not the institute. It was the conversation.
Which questions are still alive?
- Does it take a shock to change how people live, or can a good story get there first?
- When the shock passes, what stays? How many of the gardens planted in 2020 are still being dug?
- What is a lawn for?
- Who should be living in the big, half-empty houses?
- Erik ended our conversation hoping to farm a much bigger patch. I would like to know how that went.
I don’t have the answers. I would like to.
About this piece.
There is something exciting about going back into the EATT Magazine archive now. Not to polish the past or decide who got things right, but to find the questions that still have some life in them.
This is one of those questions.
EATT Magazine was where many of these conversations began. EATTL Learning is where we are starting to bring some of them back into the light — following what changed, what lasted and where the question wants to go next.
And behind that, something else is beginning to take shape.
EATTLabs will be the place where we can go further: follow the evidence, test different explanations, revisit old assumptions and stay with a question long enough to see what it might actually be telling us.
It is not quite ready to open yet.
But it is coming.
For now, we keep following the question.
Sources: the original interview at MAHB (21 July 2015); Erik Assadourian, It’s Spring Outside. It’s Scary Out There. It’s Time to Yardfarm (19 April 2020); Pew Research Center, Financial Issues Top the List of Reasons U.S. Adults Live in Multigenerational Homes (24 March 2022); Reuters, Home gardening blooms around the world (April 2020, as carried by the Taipei Times); For the Wild podcast, episode 366 with Erik Assadourian; the Gaian Way.
Further reading: Erik’s 2020 Yardfarm reflection · Pew on multigenerational households · For the Wild conversation with Erik Assadourian
