What is techno-crofting?
There is a tiny brewery on the shore of a sea loch in the north-west Highlands that has been bothering me for years (full disclosure: it belongs to my parents). It bothers me, not because of the beer—which is excellent—but because of what it quietly reflects about technology, supply chains, and the world we are building. This live essay is my attempt to name that reflection and think in public about where it might lead. I am also thinking about writing a book on the same subject; these posts will evolve as the argument sharpens.
I don’t have many idle moments, but I tore my hamstring whilst participating in the village Highland games yesterday, so I am on enforced bed-rest this week. That has given me time to return to a question I keep arriving at in quieter minutes: how do we build what we need with what we have? A related question—the one the potential book would pursue in more disciplined form—is this: how do you design systems that keep people supplied when you cannot rely on the outside world? I think they are the same question asked at different altitudes.
Where techno-crofting begins
Ardgour Ales sits in the grounds of the old manse, across the water from the Corran Ferry. It is not where most people would go looking for “advanced biotech”. Yet that is exactly what a well-run brewery is: a controlled biological process, driven by living cells, turning local water, grain and energy into something complex and valuable. Temperature curves matter. Cleaning regimes matter. Supply chains matter. So do power cuts, broadband, ferries, tourists, and the weather.
If you zoom out far enough, the same questions face my research lab in Edinburgh, a croft in Ardnamurchan, an Antarctic station, or a small crew on Mars: how do you keep complex biological and technological systems running when the lorry—or the resupply ship—might not come for months, or at all? And whether in Morvern or on the Moon, what are the requirements not only for habitability but for people and communities to thrive?
That, for me, is where techno-crofting begins.
What is a techno-croft?
Crofting is the old Highland system of small-scale, often marginal land holdings: bounded plots, common grazings, a culture of making do, sharing, and thinking in decades rather than quarters. It is not romantic. It is a way of living at the edge of things.
Near my dad’s place there is a Highland Clearances village called Aoineadh Mòr. It was settled for generations before the villagers were forced to move in 1824—to make way for sheep. I have long been fascinated by how small the flux of materials was across the boundary of the village. Flows in: tools, cookware, loom hardware; salt, cloth, and small amounts of food; ideas, information, and invoices for rent. Flows out: cattle, butter, cheese; timber; and labour. Inside the boundary, people lived and thrived—they had song and community, beer and bread, houses and heat. Not a post-apocalyptic struggle. A bounded life with limits that were understood.
A techno-croft is what you get when you take that crofting mindset and augment it with technology. Full techno-crofts, as an integrated whole, do not exist yet. But a partial one does: my parents’ brewery is a working bioprocess at the edge of the grid—not a self-sufficient community in a brewhouse, and not a rehearsal site for Mars, but a real loop in a network that still mostly relies on the ferry.
Instead of land alone, you have a bounded patch of infrastructure, perhaps including:
- a brewery and a workshop;
- a cluster of small bioreactors and algae tanks;
- some robust microcontrollers and robots;
- a modest amount of power;
- and a finite stock of spare parts.
Instead of assuming Amazon, RS and TSMC will deliver whatever you forgot, you design as if they might not.
A techno-croft is:
- Small and place-rooted.
- Built around loops (waste back into feedstock) rather than straight lines.
- Designed for constraints—power, parts, skill, and budget as the brief, not annoyances to wish away.
- Designed for sufficiency and repair rather than abundance and replacement.
- Run by people who understand their systems well enough to fix them with what is on hand.
In other words: a croft, but the “fields” are bioreactors, robotic workshops and repairable hardware.
Sci-fi fans and videogame enthusiasts will recognise pieces of this story—thin trade links, scrap in and tools out, energy in and waste out, local knowledge and repair. Waterworld, Fallout, Mad Max push those constraints to melodrama. Techno-crofting is not that. It is the same structural insight without the apocalypse: what happens when import is slow, expensive, or interrupted, and you still need to eat, keep the lights on, and fix the pumps and pipes.
Why this matters now
Modern engineering assumes invisible abundance. We design as if there will always be more chips, more bandwidth, more container ships, more grid, more everything. That assumption is increasingly wrong.
- Semiconductor supply has been repeatedly squeezed by AI, automotive demand and geopolitics.
- Climate change and global pandemics have made long, fragile just-in-time supply chains look less clever than they did on a consultant’s slide.
- Human spaceflight, if it ever gets serious, cannot rely on weekly deliveries from Earth to keep people alive on Mars.
At the same time, the places that get labelled “peripheral” or “remote”—the Highlands, islands, deserts, small towns—are exactly where many of the interesting constraints live. They are also where a lot of people live. If we can design systems that genuinely work there, we know something useful about resilience everywhere.
My dad’s brewery at Ardgour is a reminder that you can run a serious biological process a long way from any city, data centre, or industrial estate. It is built, however, upon a global supply chain of grain and yeast, pumps and pipes, computers and sensors, pallets and cardboard boxes, and tourism. Groceries still come by lorry. Healthcare is distant. The question is not whether Ardgour has solved self-reliance—it has not—but what we learn if we take supply-chain constraint and minimal flux across the boundary seriously, and ask which loops are worth closing next.
From beer to biofactories
If you abstract a brewery, you get a metabolism:
- Inputs: water, grain, hops, yeast, energy.
- Transformations: mashing, boiling, fermenting, conditioning.
- Outputs: beer, CO₂, spent grain, heat, wastewater.
Now imagine extending that metabolism.
Photobioreactors or algae ponds that take in light, water and CO₂ and produce biomass or dissolved organics. Microbial electrosynthesis (MES) units that use electricity and electroautotrophic microbes to turn CO₂ into simple molecules like acetate or lactate. Downstream fermenters that take those simple molecules and build protein, bioplastics, or even precursors for drugs and antibodies.
None of this requires billion-euro industrial plants. At lab and pilot scales, people are already coupling MES reactors to upgrading bioreactors to make single-cell protein from CO₂ and electricity. The question for a techno-croft is not “is it possible?” but “what is the minimum viable metabolism that actually feeds—for example—four people and keeps them healthy?” And, just as importantly: who maintains it?
That is where techno-crofting gets interesting: when one starts doing back-of-the-envelope calculations for how many square metres of algae, how many litres of reactor, and how many watts of power you really need. Much of the technology exists; the economic incentive is often missing. I have written about doughnut economics and robotics before; it is the same story here. Planetary boundaries will not stay optional forever. Whether the techno-croft sits in Morvern or as in Wall-E—drifting above a depleted planet—the design problem is the same: bounded metabolism, finite imports, operators who have to understand their systems.
The Highlands and Mars
Once you start thinking this way, the Highlands and Mars begin to look similar in constraint, not in solution.
Both are edges: harsh weather, limited infrastructure, slow resupply, big consequences for small failures. A Martian habitat has to recycle air and water, grow food, make basic drugs and keep life-support hardware running with a finite stock of spares. A Highland community faces a softer version of the same arithmetic: what must be local, what can be imported, and what fails when import stops? (Beer is not technically required on Mars, but seems to be a persistent feature of human civilisation thus far.)
In both cases, the engineering problem is not “can we get the latest gadget here?” but “can we design a system whose metabolism is robust to shocks, understandable by its operators, and fixable with what they have?”
Arcology experiments like Arcosanti in the Arizona desert (which I visited a few years ago) tried to answer that at city scale: compact architecture plus ecology, elegant frugality, walking distance between everything, integrated food–energy–water systems. Techno-crofting takes a lot of that thinking but explores micro-brewery-scale up to habitat-scale. Aoineadh Mòr was not a survivalist compound. It was a community that knew its boundary. Given that we are going to build Moon bases and ships that will carry people to Mars or beyond, there may be lessons in augmenting the ways of the past with the technologies of the future—up there and down here, with Earth’s edge communities first in line for the transfer, not last.
What I want to explore
This is a live essay, as always. Over the next few updates I want to try to:
- Make techno-crofting precise enough to be useful, not just a cute phrase.
- Use remote microbreweries like Ardgour, microbial electrosynthesis, algae and arcology as concrete case studies—always as partial examples, not as proof that the problem is solved.
- Do some Fermi-style ballpark sums: what would it take, in rough numbers, to run a four-person techno-croft?
- Ask what this way of thinking means for rural communities, for technological independence, and for how we design robots, chips and bioreactors in a world where “the edge” is not an exception but the rule.
The aim is not to produce a blueprint. It is to get clearer on a simple question about how to build what we need with what we have:
How do you design systems that keep people supplied when you cannot rely on the outside world?
If you wish to discuss any of this, or to engage on a project or a talk, you can reach me at a.a.stokes@ed.ac.uk.