by Robert Jensen
Caitlin Taylor believes that a sustainable food system needs “legible” infrastructure, which is why she proposes—not entirely in jest—building slaughterhouses next to farmers markets.
Architects and engineers usually strive to make infrastructure invisible—so functional and reliable that we forget about the countless systems that undergird modern life. We turn on a faucet without wondering where the water came from and flush toilets without thinking about waste-treatment plants.
Most people probably prefer invisible infrastructure for beef production and poultry processing, but Taylor believes that the legibility of infrastructure—making systems visible and understandable—is crucial for justice and sustainability in food production.
“There is a transformative power in making infrastructure accessible, on a human scale, specific to a place,” said Taylor, an architect and a farmer. “Our goal is a food system that people can understand—what it is, how it operates, where the food is coming from. That makes it easier to see the need for real change.”
Taylor said that one problem in today’s food system is “the missing middle.” Between a globalized corporate industry on one end of the spectrum and local farmers markets on the other, there is not enough regional storage and processing infrastructure, either for small farmers who need to sell crops or for businesses that make and bake food products. Taylor wants to change that, starting close to her own backyard.
The Making of a Farmer/Architect
Taylor followed a winding path to this work. She grew up in downtown Syracuse, NY, with no tractors in sight. After studying biochemistry at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, she worked for a year as a neuroscience research assistant studying dopamine pathways at Columbia University, where one of her tasks was dissecting human brains for imaging.
Taylor’s interest in design emerged when she took a job at an architecture firm in New York City, which led to a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University in 2013. At the same time, her husband abandoned law school plans in favor of becoming a farmer. Architecture and agriculture started to come together for Taylor with a research paper about how manufacturers’ standardization of the dimensions of farm equipment affected farm practices, which she wrote for a course taught by one of her mentors, Yale professor Keller Easterling. She also discovered the work of Wes Jackson, an early advocate of sustainable agriculture.
Taylor’s first successful infrastructure design came while still at Yale. She and fellow student Amy Mielke proposed a method to treat urban floodwater and runoff as a local resource instead of a liability. When it won the prestigious Holcim Foundation prize, they had funding to spend six months working on the project in Las Vegas, NV.
After working at a small architectural firm to accumulate the hours needed to get licensed, Taylor joined MASS Design Group (Model of Architecture Serving Society), where she founded the Food Systems Design Lab. Taylor believed that architecture should be about more than designing pretty buildings, that architects needed to help rethink failing social systems, especially food and agriculture. Among her projects at MASS were the Kingston Food Co-op, a member-owned cooperative grocery store in Kingston, NY, and Corn/Meal in Columbus, IN, an installation to remind city dwellers of the importance of the corn crop to the state.
After serving as Interim Managing Director at the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in 2023, Taylor founded Midcourse Design & Development with Mielke to focus on designing, financing, and building regional infrastructure in the Northeast. While working on the ground with people and businesses to meet immediate needs, they also address the big changes necessary in the global system.
Taylor is also a farmer, co-founding Four Root Farm in 2013 with her husband and two friends. They cultivate about seven acres of organic vegetables, berries, and flowers on a 16-acre property in East Haddam, CT, selling mostly in farmers markets.
In addition to all these responsibilities, Taylor has taught off and on at the Yale School of Architecture since 2016. Taylor said she loves engaging with students without having to give up her practice or farmwork and isn’t tempted to become a full-time professor.
Failing Food Systems and a Regional Response
Taylor said that when she was finishing grad school, she sometimes felt a bit crazy telling friends that, even with all the food produced in the world, there was a global food crisis. That argument is a lot easier to make today, she said, with growing awareness of the problems that come with those bountiful harvests.
Since the end of World War II, yields have increased dramatically with innovations in plant breeding, petrochemical-based inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides), machinery, and management. But those increased yields come at a cost. Industrial agriculture has intensified soil erosion and degradation, contaminated land and water, and reduced biodiversity. Food production consumes about half of the planet’s habitable land surface and 70 percent of its freshwater, and its carbon emissions are a significant contributor to climate instability.
Taylor and her Four Root partners practice a more sustainable agriculture—small, organic, labor-intensive—but making a living at that scale is challenging. Community-supported agriculture (CSAs) and farmers markets produce social benefits such as better health and greater community cohesion, but not always an adequate revenue stream. Taylor started asking, what’s in the middle for farmers? What options are there between working under the thumb of multinational food corporations and struggling with the limitations of local sales? Small may be beautiful, but independent farmers need processing facilities nearby to make a living and communities need that regional infrastructure for food security.
Taylor said that decades of corporate consolidation have left the northeast United States without the facilities needed to move food locally, store it safely, and process it into value-added products. Long-distance transport, centralized distribution, and global agribusiness corporations not only contribute to ecological degradation but undermine farm viability and food security. The existing system is fragile; small shocks can quickly cascade into big crises. Shrinking markets for regional producers and the loss of agricultural livelihoods could lead to empty grocery store shelves in tough times.
For Taylor, regional food infrastructure not only solves a business problem but builds civic resilience. “When designed with care, these facilities become gathering places that promote dignity and economic agency,” she said. “They influence how people work, access food, express culture, and build shared futures.”
The Hartford Hub and Other Projects
For Midcourse, this need for mid-range infrastructure is where the action is. “This work involves designing buildings not only to function in the existing system but to help create a new system,” Taylor said. “We want to design buildings that help people today and help change the world.”
An example is the Hartford Hub redevelopment project in the North End, a predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhood that is poorer than the rest of the Connecticut city. The proposed hub would support small and mid-sized farms by providing a space for institutions to buy local produce in bulk and for consumers to shop for lightly processed and shelf-stable food. Taylor hopes the Hartford Hub will be a proof of concept for “future-facing regional aggregation infrastructure.” (Taylor speaks with passion but sometimes wanders into the wonky jargon of her profession.)
Taylor said regional food security requires social justice and ecological sustainability. Midcourse is working in Hartford with the Keney Park Sustainability Project, which provides outreach and training to develop neighborhood food systems—home, school, and community gardens, along with farmers markets—that enhance families’ health and encourage environmental stewardship. The city and state grants that helped get the project off the ground have required extensive conversations with farmers, community members, and public officials—the way Midcourse likes to work.
Other Midcourse projects include work with:
- Breadtree Farms, designing and constructing the largest chestnut-processing facility in North America in Salem, NY.
- Brooklyn Packers, designing a cold storage, packing, and retail space in Bedford–Stuyvesant to support community food access.
- Headwater Food Hub, designing a new regional food logistics campus in Rochester, NY.
- The Land Institute, designing a campus for the sustainable-agriculture organization in Salina, KS, that will be a working research site and a model for regenerative land-based design.
Practical Visionary
Taylor is best described as a practical visionary.
The visionary: Taylor recognizes that the easiest-to-sell reforms of existing systems aren’t adequate to reverse the unsustainable human exploitation of the ecosphere. She imagines a radically different future in a more cooperative economic system with deeper community connections—the kinds of changes that take generations.
The practical: Taylor is not waiting around for better social systems to magically appear before getting to work. She loves the design work of an architect and the outdoor labor of the farm but realizes that Midcourse’s regional infrastructure projects require investment, which means she needs to be not only an architect and a farmer but an entrepreneur.
Taylor admits that managing a growing staff, and the financing and fundraising that requires, aren’t as much fun as tending crops and designing buildings. But she sees that work more as choreography than management, a creative enterprise rather than a form of control. “I like not only thinking about ideas myself, but also listening to others, translating their ideas for the team, piecing together all these parts of a project,” she said. “You learn to love the process.”
While focused on the practical, Taylor doesn’t suppress her prophetic instincts, always coming back to the need to confront ecological realities and commit to radical change.
“We often hear that the food system is broken, and I always try to correct this,” Taylor said. “It’s not broken—it’s performing exactly the way it was designed to perform by the multinational corporations that profit from the externalized costs, social and ecological, of how food is grown.”
Instead of an industrial food system that is “anonymous, placeless, and invisible,” Taylor imagines a way of feeding ourselves that is rooted in places. Everything we eat may not be grown just down the road by a neighbor living in bucolic bliss, but robust regional infrastructure could help farmers make a living and enhance community life.
Taylor also can sound like an architectural evangelical.
“Design is a language for imagining the future. It’s also a method of translation, a way of making the invisible visible,” she said. “We have a responsibility for shaping the world we want for our children’s children, and design is the language we use to shape that world.”