Strategic Pillars
A multi-stakeholder network of camp leads, chefs, food stewards, and sustainability teams, building momentum across the work already underway.
A curated guide to regenerative, local, and low-waste sourcing, plus direct-trade pilots and shared logistics that cut transport and cost.
Onboarding camps into Green Theme Camp Community and BLAST initiatives, compost systems, and peer-to-peer exchange of practice.
Redirecting surplus food from camps toward nourishment and community benefit, not the waste stream.
A practical resource and cultural manifesto for playa kitchens, equal parts safety guide and regenerative philosophy.
A year-round testbed for regenerative food connected to Black Rock City, where ideas go into the ground.
Lightweight, achievable pilots designed to grow organically through participation across the 2026 season.
The Reroute
BRC Food Systems is sending the money behind Black Rock City's food toward local farmers who are organic, regenerative, or transitioning, and standing beside them while they make the leap.
Because today, those dollars move through a handful of conglomerates (Costco, US Foods, Walmart, Bonanza) and flow out of the region for good, taking more from the land than they give back. Regenerative sourcing sends them back into living soil, cleaner water, and the people who steward it.
A one-way line. The dollars leave the region and never return, and the land is left poorer.
A closed loop. Every dollar cycles back through soil, harvest, and community, and into the land again.
The Table
Within 100 miles of Black Rock City, we've located 26+ regenerative and organic farms: real land, real stewards, already doing the work. This year we're channeling their harvest onto the playa, sourced from the farmers we're choosing to fund instead of the conglomerates we've always defaulted to.
For the camps who help build it
Friday at dawn, the mobile and ephemeral kitchens of the new flow gather as one: breakfast built from regenerative ingredients, food and beats from 5 to 10am. A surprise for the camps helping reroute the harvest. You'll know it when you find it.
Food as Civic Infrastructure
Food is often treated as a private, logistical concern. Yet kitchens may be the city's most powerful spaces for community, collaboration, education, resilience, and behavior change at scale. By improving how food is sourced, prepared, shared, recovered, and composted, Black Rock City could become a prototype for the urban food systems of the future, rooted in participation, stewardship, and collective care.
Food Recovery & Redistribution
Building on prototypes from Burners Without Borders, we explored how surplus food from camps can become nourishment instead of waste, receiving pre-burn donations, taking in food from camps closing kitchens during Strike, and running a volunteer public kitchen on the Esplanade.
Fly Ranch, Living Prototype
Just north of the playa, Fly Ranch is where BRC Food Systems puts ideas into the ground, community agriculture, compost, soil regeneration, ingredient production and preservation, and gatherings that move knowledge between the land and the city.
In the field
Gardens taking root, kitchens feeding thousands, and the communities growing them.
2026 Pilot Initiatives
Beginning with lightweight, achievable actions, designed to grow through participation.
The Invitation
We invite the people already shaping food at BRC to help co-create what comes next.
Direct Trade
