Across global landfill sites, the inability of increasing quantities of material surplus from various sectors to “return to the soil” has brought into sharp focus the biological incompatibility between today’s overground and underground material systems. Meanwhile, global crop residues (agricultural by-products left in the field) are estimated at over 5.5 billion tons per year of potentially valuable biomaterial inputs that could support circular material economies for upcycled products, from textiles to packaging, furniture and building materials. More critically, the rapid loss and degradation of “living soil” cultivated by biological communities at the interface of both systems, represents a growing threat to the fundamental mechanism underpinning the circular renewal of sustainable food resources for the planet. “Soil Sisters” aims to investigate a new paradigm for connecting agricultural waste to large-scale regional material supply chains, in which improving soil nutrition and soil resiliency underpins the design goal of providing cross-sectoral environmental performance through the provision of new biomaterial systems. Focusing on the agricultural, food, and textile material life cycle, the spring 2026 Soil Sisters research seminar will continue to explore and expand a catalog of biobased, non-toxic building materials and biobased dyes. Beginning and ending with agricultural practices, diverse soil health conservation practices have been the central tenet of long-term ecological resilience. For example in Guatemala, as well as across Native American cultures, “three sister” cropping practices have been studied widely as an effective method of enhancing nutrient fixation and maintaining nutrient balances in soil. Not only do such soil conservation practices offer strategies for crop resilience in the face of climate change phenomena, but they also propose material resource programming logics from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Conversely, cyclical practices of layered mulching observed in traditional proka agriculture across Ghana offer important insights for spatializing and timing the degradation of materials at the end of their life cycles and accelerating plant regeneration. Students explore the nurturing and expanding of such multicrop value chains resulting in a class of “soil sister” products, ranging from building materials, biobased dyes to textiles products.