THOMAS WOLTZ
Principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, on the Board of Directors of the Cultural Landscape Foundation and the University of Virginia School of Architecture Foundation. Recipient of the Land for People Award by the Trust for Public Land in 2019 and considered to be one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company in 2017.
Thomas Woltz has expanded the boundaries of the profession of Landscape Architecture. As the sole owner and principal of the distinguished firm Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW), Thomas and his team have taken the small Charlottesville, VA-based firm and built one of the most preeminent design offices in the country while staying grounded to the origins of their practice.
NBW is a mission-based firm rooted in relationship building and a commitment to upholding their aim of applying ‘design excellence at the intersection of ecological and cultural systems.’ Where many mission statements lack seriousness, Woltz embodies his own in a way relatable to other farmers and land-based practitioners who grew up tethered to their rural environments. His upbringing on a cattle and tobacco farm in Mount Airy, North Carolina, instilled in him a sense of stewardship that has followed his work from farmland conservation in Albemarle County, VA, to the largest urban development in Manhattan in a century.
Where many high-profile firms are urban-based, NBW is land-based. So it comes with little surprise that over the past two decades, Woltz has blurred the geographic boundaries of the firm’s work and embarked on bringing NBW’s toolkit to the ‘working landscapes’ of the rural countryside. Initially an experiment, NBW has firmly established their ‘Conservation Agriculture Studio’ over the last twenty years that holds a growing portfolio of work addressing the ecological, cultural, and economic needs of these projects and their surrounding communities.
In NBW’s 2013 monograph entitled, ‘Garden, Park, Community, Farm’ landscape theorist and historian Elizabeth Meyer, put it this way:
“ For centuries, landscape architects have referenced the agricultural landscape and mined its planted form types and geometric patterns for design tactics and tropes. But few landscape architects have consciously taken on the shaping, transformation, and reformation of actual rural agricultural landscapes, in the manner currently practiced by NBW. Their vision for a collaborative practice involving landowners, conservation biologists, landscape ecologists, soil scientists, and farm managers has the potential to create regional landscape mosaics of more productive crops and herds, regenerative ecosystems, and healthier watersheds.”
Those who have collaborated with Woltz, heard him lecture or walked the sites of many of the firm's projects can sense the fulfillment this work brings him at the deepest personal level. Our conversation with him reflected this, and we continue to be inspired by his vision and impact on expanding design thinking to the rural countryside.
For more on NBW’s Conservation Agriculture Studio, you can listen to a 2015 TED talk Woltz gave entitled ‘From landscape architecture to conservation agriculture’ and follow the firm's work as new projects and announcements continue to emerge. Including the upcoming opening of Memorial Park Land Bridge and Prairie in Houston, Texas, on February 11th, 2023.
Thomas Woltz at Orongo Station a 3,000-acre sheep station on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand.
You are one of the few practitioners working globally who has defined part of their practice in the rural context. How did the NBW Conservation Agriculture Studio come about? Where is it going?
The origins of the Conservation Agriculture Studio of Nelson Byrd Woltz (NBW) lie deep in my own childhood growing up on a family farm in a rural town called Mount Airy, North Carolina. Later, during graduate school I often read about agriculture being the largest contributor to non-point source pollution in the United States. It was evident that food grown through the industrial model was killing the soil and compromising the health of the farmers in the process. Meanwhile, in my coursework I was studying the scientific aspects of landscape architecture, including geology, soil science, horticulture, and dendrology. In design courses, we were trained in road design and construction practices related to stormwater management, including grading and drainage. Upon graduating, I realized that all of these tools could be useful in the agrarian context. However, what farmer would ever think to hire a landscape architect to support the design of a productive landscape? When I went to work with my professor (later my partner at NBW), Warren Byrd, we had multiple clients, in the very early days of the practice, who held large tracts of land either in easement or with minimal agricultural outputs to sustain tax credits as farmland. They certainly didn’t hire us to design productive farms. But I started asking if we could take on some of the larger landscape, it’s management, and associated enterprises. This gave us a start and it has grown exponentially from there.
What evolved over the next decade was a design process that engaged conservation biologists, ecologists, and farm consultants as part of our design process to help evaluate the health and document the complexity of existing ecosystems through rapid biological assessments. These assessments would then guide the design of a biodiversity framework that would eventually shape the comprehensive plan of the property. Management strategies often included fire, disturbance through livestock, mechanical disturbance, and invasive plant management. Over the last two decades, we have initiated the restoration of hundreds of acres of diverse grasslands and forests, and miles of improved wetlands and streams. We began applying the term Conservation Agriculture Studio to this family of projects to capture the process we were developing – focused on ecological and agricultural production.
An essential voice in this work was that of farmers committed to regenerative practices, who could help us understand the finances and methods of cultivation that the soils could sustain. One of these consultants has been Zach Wolf, former director of the Young Farmers Training Program at Stone Barns in Pantico Hills, NY. Over the years, Zach has provided NBW with soil analyses and ideas for the crops and enterprises they could sustain. Having been trained in conservation biology prior to becoming a farmer, he intuitively understands the essence of what we are trying to achieve.
One major flaw in the early years of this work was that we were not engaging sufficiently with the cultural landscape in these agricultural settings. From childhood I knew very well that the stories, legends, mysteries, and tales of the people who farmed formed a rich culture around agriculture that my family and I valued immensely. Perhaps in those earliest projects, it was too close for me to see as something I should be focused on. It took a unique commission in New Zealand for me to awaken fully to the urgent need to research and document the cultural heritage that shaped productive landscapes for centuries as an essential factor in design and planning. Twenty-two years ago we began a working relationship with a Maori tribe of New Zealand, the Nga Tamanuhiri Iwi of the North Island, via a Conservation Agriculture design project on a 3,000-acre sheep, cattle and citrus farm. Although I began the project with little to no prior knowledge of the importance of the Maori Culture in New Zealand, understanding their history and significance quickly became a central focus of the project and proved transformational to the resulting design. From that project forward, ecological and cultural research guides the initial phase of our engagement in all agricultural design projects. The results of this methodology are analogous to weaving; pulling threads of cultural history, restoration ecology, soils, livestock, and crops, into a complex and ordered tapestry of sustainable rural landscapes.
Where the Conservation Agriculture Studio is going is a reasonable question and like any design practice, it can be unpredictable. The projects seem to come to us, by word of mouth, through lectures and publications, or through likeminded individuals who are seeking something more from their agricultural practices. I do know that more than ever we have a clear sense of the process that leads to the best work in this unusual field: research driven designs rooted in ecology, culture, and a true sense of place, and collaborative engagement at the intersection of the farmers, their soil, and the ecosystems that hold it all together.
(Image Credit Max Touhey)
NBW’s Stewardship Plan for Overlook Farms, a 320-acre estate and cultural heritage landscape originally designed by the Olmsted Brothers in Dalton, Pennsylvania. Conservation Agriculture Studio was engaged to re-envision Overlook, a 320-acre family estate and cultural heritage landscape in Dalton, Pennsylvania.
After two decades of working in rural areas, what is your process for beginning a project in a rural community? How do you gain the proper knowledge and trust of these communities when you're often coming from the outside?
Trust is perhaps the greatest obstacle in working in rural areas, particularly ones that have seen the loss of small farms to the aggregation of big agriculture. Rural areas may have also witnessed years of speculation from developers, new wealth transforming the productive landscape into pleasure or recreation landscapes, gobbling up the best soils for personal use or urban sprawl. The way to earn trust is to invest the time to build genuine relationships with the people who shape and tend those landscapes. In New Zealand, as I mentioned earlier, we developed strong relationships over more than twenty years with the Maori Elders of the Nga Tamauhiri tribe; we have attended fireman’s barbeques on Shelter Island; and participated in community meetings at local VFW Halls. Inviting people to tell their stories of the land brings them into the process where they can feel a sense of ownership and connection. They also provice a source of authentic knowledge of place that is otherwise impossible to gain from the outside. Investment of time and personal engagement are essential to building trust. With mutual trust, nearly anything is possible.
A Maori ceremony during the reintroduction of the tuatara at Orongo Station.
You’ve mentioned the value of storytelling within rural design projects. Can you elaborate on this? What are some stories that have stood out to you?
Storytelling is a way of keeping land alive. Passing on the narrative of those who shaped the land adds richness to our understanding and often inspires design ideas. We are currently working on three Conservation Agriculture projects dealing with rice production. One is in Texas and two are in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, together totaling 17,000 acres of land. Culturally, the scale of human shaping of these productive estuaries - mostly by the hands of enslaved people - is staggering and we know this through their stories. Highly technical waterworks, inspired by similar structures in West Africa, feed fresh water to the rice in these tidal situations yielding striking forms in the productive landscape that represent the toil and scale of chattel slavery. The stories of generations of labor, loss, and wealth for the very few, deepen and enrich our understanding of these monumental landscapes and those who built them.
Listening to stories of land management and land shaping from Maori Elders helped us identify the historic land uses across thousands of acres of former agricultural land, human settlements, and sites of war. These stories shaped and guided the comprehensive planning process in substantive ways.
A visual rendering from NBW’s Comprehensive Landscape Plan of Sylvester Manor Educational Farm
From your perspective, what is the defining challenge for designers working in rural places?
I believe that creative thought applied to the economic realities of rural settings in the 21st century is essential to making a lasting design impact. It is hard to retain talent in rural areas and to provide incomes that support the building of individual and multi-generational financial stability. As designers working in rural areas, I think we need to envision projects as having long-term convening potential, establishing systems for shared resources, and working toward building resilient communities of practice. Not to over romanticize the past, but even in my childhood in a rural Southern town, there was a distribution of local wealth and a community of support that brought resilience to the region. In the 1970s, Main Street Mount Airy was still filled with locally owned retail: Boyles Shoe Store, Palace Barber Shop, Holcomb’s Hardware Store, Wolf’s Drugs, Hinkle’s Bookstore, and Baldwin’s Department Store. My family knew the shopkeepers and owners of each of these stores and we were woven together through commerce within our community. The opening of a Walmart corresponded to the closing of every one of these businesses, concentrating the wealth of an entire community into a massive corporate entity far from the town that fed it. Finding ways that rural projects generate income and retain it within their communities is essential to the preservation of rural culture.
Woltz and NBW Conservation Biologist Thomas Baker studying forest health in support of the Circle Bar Ranch Master Plan in southern Mississippi. (Image Credit Clay Gruber)
NBW’s team visited timber mills in Mississippi and Alabama for research in support of the Circle Bar Ranch Master Plan. (Image Credit Clay Gruber)
What does Thomas Woltz's ideal future for the rural countryside look like?
I think I am getting a glimpse of it in my own life. It’s a personal story but you’re asking a personal question so here goes. My mother was born in a small town called Waynesville, North Carolina. It has been a town of about 10,000 people for the last 50 years. It has lost most of the industry that sustained it over the last century: shoe manufacturing, furniture manufacturing, and Dayton Rubber Plant are all gone now and only a Champion Fiber papermill survives today (now Evergreen Packaging). I realize these industries are not the rural countryside but they sustain the small centers that support the rural countryside, so they are part of the puzzle. The region has very rich soils and benevolent rainfall, making the agricultural production viable for field crops and fruit orchards, and many small farms persist.
During my childhood, I only spent holidays and a week each summer there visiting my mother’s family. When my mother died, my sister and I decided to renovate her family home, honoring her memory, but, since we both live in New York, the likelihood of us using it more than we ever had as children was slim. Then along came COVID-19. I ended up moving to Waynesville for the better part of the last two years where I discovered signs of a town enjoying a revival of small town and rural life. Over those two years I have met more than a dozen young and talented people who have moved there, as I did, during the pandemic, seeking a more authentic existence than what was offered in the cities they left. What they discovered was a terrific quality of life in a connected rural community. They are an enterprising group engaged in growing vegetables, leathercraft, distilling spirits, haberdashery, and horticultural nursery trades. Some are continuing their prior work remotely, including software engineering, editing for online publishers, fire safety engineering, and, for me, practicing landscape architecture. We gather regularly for hospitality and fellowship in the town center to which many of us can walk. People care for each other and support one another’s enterprises in ways that give me hope for rural communities to regain and sustain populations that were lost since with the rise of national retail chains, big agriculture, and the decline of American manufacturing. I am hopeful that more architects and landscape architects will turn to these areas and support them while finding a more meaningful life for themselves as part of a rare place in today’s world: a thriving rural community.
Chicken Coops at Overlook Farms.
Images provided by Nelson Byrd Woltz unless otherwise noted.
