Closed-loop community systems · Central Appalachia

Arcology — a new model for affordable rural living.

Food, water, energy, and fertility, organized to close on site so a community sustains itself instead of importing its survival.

Pikeville, Kentucky USDA Zone 6a An open exploration

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100 people per pilot unit ~425 kg N/yr recovered from urine ~75% of calories from the land — by design 0 synthetic fertilizer required

The problem

Rural communities pay a premium to import their own survival.

Across rural and post-industrial America, the basics are trucked in and piped out — and every one of those open loops carries capital out of the community. Each problem is treated separately, with a separate, expensive fix.

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Food shipped in

Counties grow commodity crops for export while residents drive an hour to fresh produce. In rural areas, "low access" means more than ten miles to a supermarket.

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Inputs bought in

Farms depend on synthetic fertilizer, fuel, and feed they don't control — costs that have grown more expensive and more volatile, where one disrupted supply chain can erase a season.

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Infrastructure aging out

Costly municipal water and sewer systems built for populations that have since left, maintained on a shrinking tax base.

The insight

These aren’t separate problems requiring separate fixes. They’re the same problem — open loops — and they are cheaper to solve together than apart.

Water, nutrients, calories, and energy are flows. If you design a community so those flows close on site instead of leaving the system carrying value, the recurring cost of living there drops structurally. The enabling pieces — source separation, nutrient recovery, affordable solar, decentralized water, remote-work connectivity — exist. The work is integrating them into a single community design where the flows reinforce each other rather than running in parallel.

~75%

of daily calories from the land — by design

425 kg

nitrogen recovered per 100 residents / year

synthetic fertilizer inputs required

100

people served per pilot unit

The model · Four subsystems, one loop

Towers do nutrition. Land does calories. The loop does the fertilizer.

Each part is sized off the same per-100-people unit, so growth is replication, not redesign.

01 · Residences

The people — demand and source.

40 households (2.5/hh) ringed around the tower, uphill of the cascade. Rooftop rainwater catchment ≈ domestic demand. Source-separating fixtures send urine, solids, and greywater out on three separate pipes.

~4,600 m³/yrrainwater captured · ≈ domestic demand

02 · Core tower

The icon — greens, fish, eggs.

A daylit grow dome with rotating aeroponic cylinders, a trout RAS basin, and laying hens. The clean potable loop is firewalled from the nutrient side. LED silos take it from icon to volume when density needs to climb.

15,000 kg produce · 2,000 kg trout · 27,000 eggsper tower per year

03 · Land tier

The calories — staples on contour.

Concentric rings double as contour terraces. A Three Sisters guild plus storage apples, sorghum, chestnut, and hazelnut — grown in season, kept for winter in cellar and bin.

~75% of daily caloriesfrom the land tier

04 · Nutrient loop

The engine — nutrients come home.

A gravity cascade: struvite from urine, black soldier flies on solids, vermifilter, constructed wetland, duckweed lagoon. Returns to the land as fertilizer and feed.

~425 kg N · ~38 kg Precovered per 100 residents per year

The spatial model

The rings aren’t a rendering flourish. They’re contour lines.

On steep Appalachian terrain, a radial plan doubles as water infrastructure: planting rows run along the rings to catch water and stop erosion, and the radial paths are access spines and drainage ways. Zones are ordered by intensity, cleanliness, and elevation — clean water enters high, nutrients exit low, and gravity does the pumping.

Plan view, one 100-person unit. Rings run on contour; radial paths carry access and drainage.

0 Core towerclean Grow cylinders, trout RAS, potable purification. The clean heart of the system.
1 Intensive ringclean + grey Daily-harvest greens, high tunnels, community kitchen and processing.
2 Residencespotable in / waste out 40 households, uphill of treatment. Rooftop catchment in; urine, solids, and greywater out on three separate pipes.
3 Staple terracesnutrient irrigation Annual staples on contour: Three Sisters guild, potatoes, squash, sweet potato.
4 Peripherydirty / downhill Perennial agroforestry, grain plots, storage core — and the nutrient cascade at the lowest edge, where gravity delivers everything to it.

Section view. Residences sit uphill of treatment, so the whole nutrient cascade runs on gravity — the only pump in the loop is the return.

The daylit grow dome: rotating cylinders, fish basin at the base, rainwater cap.

The icon

The dome is the image. The silos are the volume.

The daylit dome anchors the model: sun-driven, low opex, photogenic — capped at ~4–6 effective grow layers by self-shading. For density past that, the system shifts to corrugated LED silos: cheap envelope, 12–20 layers on a rotary that brings every cylinder to one ground-level harvest station. Both are sized off the same per-100-people unit.

Rainwater harvesting domeRoof captures and filters rainwater for the whole system. Potable in, never mixes with the cascade.
Rotating grow cylindersAeroponic towers rotate for even light. ~75 cylinders, four daylit tiers.
Trout RAS basin~100 m³ at the base. Cold-water; firewalled from the nutrient side. ~2,000 kg edible/yr.
Mechanical levelFiltration, biological treatment, UV. The clean loop’s brain.

The engine

We don’t produce waste. We produce fertilizer.

A community’s own outflows separate at the source and run downhill by gravity through five stages — returning nitrogen and phosphorus to the land, chemically identical to mined fertilizer. The clean side and the nutrient side never share an open surface.

The cleanliness firewall

The trout RAS and potable loop never share an open surface with the duck/duckweed/wetland side. Ducks live on the nutrient pond, not the fish basin. The dashed line in the diagram marks that separation.

Regulatory discipline by design

The clean routes — urine→struvite (sterile at source) and BSF→non-food-feed — are what the plumbing is built around. Every output that touches food is mapped before concrete is poured.

The model in numbers

Two levers, run independently.

Height drives people fed per acre. Cluster size drives what shared infrastructure unlocks. They’re separate variables on separate sliders — pull each one independently.

Lever AHeight → Density

Effective grow layers per tower footprint. Daylit caps at ~6; LED unlocks ~12–20 at an energy cost.

Mode

Layers

425 people/acre Sun-driven. No LED energy load.

Lever BCluster → Shared infrastructure

Shared central plant, standardized fabrication, one big solar array. Each tier unlocks more shared infrastructure.

Towers

Pilot stage Single-tower system. No shared infrastructure yet.

Output — what this cluster produces

Pilot

100

people fed · 40 households · ~10 acres of staple terraces

Produce

15,000kg/yr

Trout

2,000kg/yr

Eggs

27,000/yr

Nitrogen recovered

425kg/yr

BSF feedstock

5,000kg/yr

Rainwater captured

4,600m³/yr

Infra capex / household

$50,000

Monthly infra share

$32225 yr · 6%

Tower share of daily calories: ~11%. The land tier supplies the balance — staples grown on the contour terraces below the residence ring. The calorie ladder section walks the math. Capex per household assumes $2.0M per tower at pilot, falling up to 40% with cluster scale — planning parameters, not quotes; the economics section carries the full ledger.

The calorie ladder

Tower delivers nutrition. Land delivers calories.

Daily target: 2,250 kcal/person. Stacked from the bottom: every protein and produce stream the tower supplies, then the staples that close the gap. The split follows what each tier grows efficiently — sun and soil for calorie density on the land, the tower’s volume for high-value nutrition.

0 kcal2,250 kcal/person/day

Greens5.5% Trout3.4% Chicken eggs2.4% Double trout3.4% Duck eggs4.4% Broiler3.3% Rabbit2.1% Land staples75.5%

Tower ceiling without staples ≈ 25%, maybe 30% with full animal-fat stacking. The remaining ~75% is land — corn, beans, potatoes, squash, sweet potato, sorghum, sunflower, nuts.

The story in one number

~75%

of the community’s daily calories come from the staple terraces. The tower carries diet quality; the land carries the calorie load. That ratio is the design.

Persistent gaps Cooking oil at volume (sunflower pressing narrows it) and high-protein bread wheat. Cornbread, rye, and buckwheat are the regionally honest answer.

The honest labor ladder

Closed loops don’t run themselves. Here is the time bill.

Closed food systems fail on labor economics more often than on biology — so the labor gets the same honest accounting as the calories. First-pass planning estimates per 100 residents, to be replaced by a real logged-hours ledger from the demonstration.

Subsystem	The work	Hours / week
Core tower	Seeding, harvest, fish feeding, water chemistry, hens	~55, year-round
Staple terraces	Planting, cultivation, harvest — strongly seasonal	~10 winter → ~120 peak
Nutrient cascade	BSF handling, struvite reactor, wetland checks	~14
Processing & storage	Cellaring, ferments, milling, eggs & fish processing	0 → ~60 (Aug–Nov)

The bill, totaled

~4 FTE

About 7,800 hours a year — roughly four full-time equivalents per 100 residents. Spread across 40 households, that is ~4 hours a week per household averaged over the year: ~7 in peak season, ~2 in deep winter.

That number is the honest price of closing the loop — and it is the foundation the membership model below is built on. If the real ledger comes in higher, the model changes.

Living here

Own a share. Work the loop — or fund the hands that do.

A community is not a subsystem, and the loop only closes if the labor ledger clears every season. The working model: membership buys ownership, and every household settles its share of the labor ladder in one of two currencies — time or money — cleared at the same rate. A third path staffs the science.

Path 1 · Own & work

Your time is the utility bill.

Join with a one-time membership fee that buys your household’s share of the common infrastructure. Commit your slice of the labor ladder — about four hours a week, averaged — feeding fish, working terraces, running the cellar. Food, water, and fertility are what your hours buy.

~4 hrs/week · household share

Path 2 · Own & fund

Buy your hours out. Fund a steward.

Same ownership, but if your work or travel doesn’t bend, pay your labor share instead — roughly $4,300 a year at a loaded steward wage. That money doesn’t vanish into dues; it directly funds paid steward positions. No guilt economy: time and money clear at the same rate.

~$360/month · funds real wages

Path 3 · Steward residency

Room, board, and a living lab.

A few smaller units are reserved for resident practitioners — botanists, aquaculturists, soil chemists, agriculturalists — who run the biological system full-time for room and board plus the funded steward wages. The system is their laboratory; their instruments are what keep it honest.

Work for room & board · keeps the science in-house

Governance, share resale, and the legal wrapper (cooperative, condominium association, community land trust) are open design questions — deliberately unresolved until the demonstration puts real numbers under them.

The real question

What does it actually cost to live inside the loop?

This is the question the whole exploration turns on — and the honest answer today is: modeled, not measured. Below is the first-pass monthly ledger for the basics (the dwelling itself is excluded; you build or buy a home either way), against a conventional rural Kentucky household of 2.5 people. Every figure is a named parameter, not a promise.

Monthly, per household	Conventional rural KY	In the loop — working	In the loop — funded
Water & sewer	$75	~$0	~$0
Energy	$210	~$90	~$90
Groceries	$850	~$260	~$260
Infrastructure share ($50k over 25 yr)	—	~$320	~$320
Labor share	—	~4 hrs/wk	~$360
The basics	~$1,135	~$670 + your hours	~$1,030

~40%

modeled savings on the basics for a working household at pilot scale — the surplus the impact case is built on

$50k → $30k

infrastructure capex per household, pilot → district, as shared plant and standardized fabrication kick in

1 number

decides everything: measured capex per household. Too high and the model collapses; low enough and it compounds

The honest read: at pilot scale a working household saves meaningfully; a funded household roughly breaks even, and its return is resilience, food quality, and an owned share of real infrastructure. At cluster and district scale the infrastructure share falls (~$190/mo) and the spread widens. Grocery figures assume the land supplies ~75% of calories and the remainder — oil, wheat, coffee, salt — is bought. Pinning these parameters to measured reality is the single biggest opportunity in this exploration; the calculator above and the build directive carry the full parameter set.

The opportunity

A structural need — in a region already funding the solution.

The need is large and concentrated

The USDA estimates ~12.8% of the U.S. population lives in low-income, low-access tracts — roughly 19 million people in food deserts. Nine of the ten states with the greatest share are in the South, overlapping heavily with the communities Arcology serves. These are precisely the places with available land and a need for new economic models.

The capital is real and growing

Through its POWER Initiative alone, the Appalachian Regional Commission has invested $484.7M across 564 projects since 2015 — explicitly to fund agriculture, infrastructure, and entrepreneurship in coal-impacted communities. Its largest single package, $68.2M, came in 2024. Customers are already chasing exactly this funding.

19M

people in U.S. food deserts (USDA)

12.8%

of U.S. population in low-access tracts

$484.7M

ARC POWER investment since 2015

$68.2M

largest annual POWER package (2024)

The business model

Build to prove. License to scale. Engineer to sustain.

Build

Pilot communities

We develop pilot and demonstration communities that prove the model and generate development revenue. Capital-intensive, but the credibility engine for everything else.

Proves it

License

The model & standard

Developers, housing authorities, and municipalities adopt the model and design standard and fund their own builds. High-margin and capital-light — the licensee carries the capital.

Scales it

Engineer

Systems integration

We provide the design and systems-engineering to adapt the model to each site, monetizing the expertise directly between builds.

Sustains it

The license and engineering streams let the model travel on other people’s balance sheets — so we grow without owning every project’s capital stack.

Customer & competitive edge

A different business entirely.

Beachhead customer

The landowner-developer — an individual or small entity with rural acreage and access to capital, motivated by mission as much as margin. They have the two things a pilot needs: land and the means to build. The customer set then widens to institutional developers, housing authorities, and rural municipalities.

The moat is integration

The components are commodities anyone can buy. The hard part is assembling them into a single loop that closes affordably on a real site. Arcology serves rural communities where the value is lower cost of living, not premium urban produce. First credible, replicable standard wins the category.

Integration

accumulated systems know-how that deepens with each build

The standard

first replicable, costed model becomes the reference others build to

Founder + place

rooted in the place this must prove out in

How it scales

Pilot, prove the loop. Cluster, share the plant. District, change the region.

Each phase is sized off the same per-100-resident unit, so growth is replication, not redesign — and shared infrastructure compounds with each tier.

Phase	Towers	People / households	What it adds
Pilot	1 (partial loop)	100 / 40	One dome, prove the loop
Small	1 (full loop)	100 / 40	Complete nutrient, poultry, water loops
Cluster	5–8 + shared plant	500–800 / 200–320	Central water/nutrient/cold plant, shared solar, shared LED silos
District	30–50 (5–8 clusters)	3,000–5,000 / 1,200–2,000	District staple greenhouses, reservoir, energy plant

Rural economic impact

Rural America is not short on ingenuity. It is short on margin.

When the fixed cost of living falls structurally, households and communities gain surplus — capital and time that went to survival become available to build with. That freed capital is what people invest in their own ventures, equipment, and education. A community that sustains itself keeps its capital circulating locally instead of exporting it every month.

Households gain margin

Lower cost of living frees capital to invest in local enterprise and innovation.

A new rural industry

Each build spreads durable, place-based construction and operations jobs that can’t be offshored.

Value flows out as expertise

An Appalachian-born model exported to other rural regions — reversing a history of extraction.

The demonstration

A model you can falsify beats a model you must trust.

What exists today: this specification, a physical scale model, and conversations in the region. Nothing more is claimed. The next step is a working demonstration of the core loop — instrumented so it can fail in public. Every parameter on this page is a hypothesis; these are the measurements that test them.

Nutrient recovery

Measured kilograms of nitrogen and phosphorus actually recovered from the urine stream, against the ~425 kg N and ~38 kg P modeled per 100 residents. This is the engine claim.

The firewall

Pathogen counts in polished water under real load, proving the clean and nutrient sides never touch. This is the claim regulators and neighbors will rightly demand first.

Thermal margin

A trout basin holding under 18 °C through a Pikeville July on passive cooling alone — or the model gets honest and budgets chillers.

The labor log

Real hours by task against the ~4-FTE ladder. This is the number the membership model stands on — and the one closed-loop projects historically get wrong.

If the loop can’t clear these bars, the model changes until it can — publicly. That is what makes this an exploration rather than a pitch.

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