This is a genuine world’s first: completely reinventing the printing process by delivering a book printed by nature itself. It’s a boundary-pushing fusion of art, craft, culture, and science that takes genuine steps towards alleviating the greatest problem that the world faces in 2019. By growing a book about sustainability, this project has become a pure and literal embodiment of one of humankind’s greatest articulations of modern communication: Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase ‘The medium is the message’. This is a communication that the world sorely needs, delivered in a way the world has never seen before.

The roots of Ireland’s economy are in agriculture, but with agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions projected to increase by almost 10% over the next decade, there’s an urgent need for on-farm adoption of GHG mitigation measures.

If farming is to survive, it must become more sustainable.

AIB, Ireland’s largest bank for farmers, in partnership with Teagasc – the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority – wanted to enable farmers to maximise sustainability, by changing how they see our greatest resource: grass.

We used grass to grow a book.

This book contains 10 tangible lessons and 10 pieces of practical advice designed to help maximise sustainability and increase profitability. These 10 steps enable farmers to achieve a ‘perfect’ 10 rotations of grass grazing per year, and produce 10 tonnes of grass per hectare – a truly powerful number that will massively improve the sustainability of even the most efficient farm. in this instance, the medium truly was the message: our book was grown from the very grass that Irish farmers nurture, with each page, each word, and each diagram shaped by real grass roots as they grew.

This is a world’s first, completely rewriting the rules for how books are produced. Not only does this book lay out a practical plan of action, it symbolises the power of our natural resources. When grass is managed correctly, it can work wonders.

• Approach

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the worst offenders when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions are not the cars on our roads or the traditional enemy of big oil companies... but farms and the agriculture industry in general. This poses a major problem for Ireland, which has always been an agricultural country. If farming is to survive, it must become more sustainable. Time, however, is of the essence, and as an industry steeped in generations of tradition, Ireland’s farmers can use all the help they can get when it comes to bringing the latest scientific measures and techniques to a grassroots network of family run farms.

AIB, Ireland’s largest bank for farmers, in partnership with Teagasc – the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority – developed this project to condense and simplify this complex science into a communication borne from the very grass that offers a solution.

This is a book that has completely come from grass itself. This involved an intense design process and months of trial and error throughout the growing process, Designing for root-based ‘printing’ presented many challenges unique to this project. Every element from words to symbols to borders had to be inter-connected by channels for the roots to navigate. Complex farming processes were compressed into a bite-sized visual language of bespoke symbols, with the design of each individual glyph informed by the action or process it represented. We developed a grid system inspired by the grass paddocks in which our steps will ultimately be applied. 10 paddock rows per page allowed flexibility from page to page, while providing a uniformity that allowed the placement of individual symbols to take on additional meaning, including signifying the time in which those actions should take place.

Ireland has committed to greenhouse gas neutrality in agriculture by 2050. Every step we take towards achieving that target is vital, and this book contains win-win measures that massively impact our ability to do so. Through these steps Irish farmers will not only maximise the sustainable use of our natural resources, but also reduce reliance on artificial fertilisers, and produce less greenhouse gasses. The results of these changes will have consequences for generations.

10 -The Book That Grew has contributed to AIB being the first Irish business ever to make it to the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Climate A List, and continues to be used to deliver its important message to farming communities across the country: a lightning rod for affirmative action, and a solid plan born miraculously from the soil.