Solarpunk Farming

Instead of chemicals, an army of ants may march right in. Though most people view the small insects as little more than a nuisance, colonies of them are being deployed in orchards across a handful of countries to stave off the spread of crippling infestation and disease.

In a body of recently published and forthcoming research, Jensen examined the antimicrobial effects of wood ants, a European field ant known for building dome-shaped nests in fields and open woodlands, and weaver ants, which live in ball-shaped nests within tropical tree canopies across Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Past studies have found that for crops from cocoa to citrus, ants could replace insecticides in a multitude of climates and locations, reducing incidences of pear scab in pear trees, coffee leaf rust in coffee shrubs, and leaf fungal attacks in oak seedlings. Weaver ant nests used as an alternative pesticide in mango, cashew, and citrus trees have all been shown to lower pest damage and produce yields on par with several chemical pesticide treatments. For more than a millennia, the species was embraced as a natural insecticide in countries like China but never quite made its way into the agricultural mainstream in North America or Europe.

Urban farming is often heralded as a practical solution to food deserts, providing fresh produce to communities where unjust urban planning and policy have limited access to nutritious options. But urban farms can also sow seeds that grow far beyond the garden beds.

In Baltimore’s Curtis Bay neighborhood, Filbert Street Garden is showing the power of community-led transformation. Once an overgrown lot, it has evolved into a vibrant community hub, thanks to the dedication of Black farmers like Brittany Coverdale, whose passion for racial and environmental justice led her to the garden coordinator role at Filbert Street Garden.

Its that time of year when banana man brings da presents.

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Apple banana coming in. I've had this patch planted maybe five years. It's becoming a bit of a problem and I'm gonna have to move it because it's taking over and crowding out some native plants but I thought garden and farm nerds might want to see how non industrial bananas are grown.

You startem out as keiki:

which grow at the base of a large corm, or pseudo bulb. I usually dig them out with a shovel and then throw them in a pot like this for to transplant. I fertilize with an organic heavy phosphorus mix just to get them going.

[note: this picture isn't apple banana, but Tahitian blue banana.]

At that point, with enough water and any where from 30-100% sunlight, they establish themselves. It takes almost 18 months from keiki to mature fruiting plant, and usually your first bananas are so so in quality. However, the new keiki will be coming up (about 12 months after planting), and if you irrigate or have enough rainfall, once established, you press up up down down LRLR start select, and that unlocks the infinite banana cheat code. Bananas, once established, are insanely productive, and you can manage the sugar to fiber ratio by how early you harvest. Boiled banana a favorite at our house and we do that with very immature bananas.

When a banana plant is ready to give it starts to lean. Bananas are all effectively nodal clones from the base of the corm, and can be pretty destructive. We had some come down on a fence and with the stem, which is basically all water, and the bananas, it's at least a couple kg suspended pretty high in the air. You can also tell they ripe when they yellow up and start to fan out like a open palm 🫴. The longer you wait the better the flavor is, but also more likely to fall uncontrollably. Depending on the variety can do real damage to cars or whatever underneath.

Most of thes going to go to a food bank and we grow enough fruit to keep an ice box pretty much full all year. Anything extra goes to an auntie who that's her thang and she'll make sure they get to the right people.

More pix first. Then explanation.

So this is going on the fifth year I'll be farming Vanilla. My operation is microscopic but it's a work in progress. I've got maybe 300 vines all in. I got some Vanilla off this planting 2 years ago, and this was the first vines I planted. Which is some what typical for Vanilla. Usually 3-5 years before they really become productive.

I fertilized these back in May/ April. It's a tiny yield but next year I expect to have maybe 5-20x this amount, which means if I can sell some of it, I'll finally be able to cover some of my costs.

Right now I have about five varieties. All from either trade or from hiking to old plantations and looking for feral populations. This one is a variety of Tahitiensis and I made a vanilla bean whip cream a few months ago with it. It's a very distinctly 'bourbon' flavor. Like i ground it up in a mortar and pessle and it straight up smelled like whiskey.

So not close to enough to sell (again) this year. But next year and the following years, maybe this hobby will finally start paying itself off.

A data driven assessment of the role of verticle farming in feeding the world.

“The economics of producing leafy greens and lettuce in vertical farms can work, if electricity prices are low”

Researchers have increasingly recognized how essential fungi are to sequestering carbon in the soil and some have come to appreciate the outsized role they play in supporting crop health, mitigating climate change, and even sheltering crops from disease. As fungi's vast benefits come to light, more farmers are tapping into this vital network, learning how to work with beneficial fungi to encourage its growth in the soil, swapping tilling for microscopes.

Mycorrhizal fungi, which encompass thousands of species, can form large, underground networks, connected by branching filaments called hyphae, threading through the soil in every direction. One type of this fungi, known as arbuscular mycorrhizal, attaches directly to the cell membranes of a plant's root, facilitating a smooth delivery. Other microbes in the soil, like protozoa and nematodes, participate in this cycling, too, digesting fungi and bacteria to release their nutrients in a more available form to plants.

TLDR Biological soil amendments can be quite elusive in terms of results. Be wary and investigate the actual need the product is fulfilling and whether or not it's claimed mechanism is reasonable and effective.

Invidious link

Did you know that the Aztecs created floating gardens called chinampas because they lived on an island in the middle of a lake? The Aztec capital city, Tenochtitlan, had a large population, so to help feed the people in it, the Aztecs used these island gardens to cultivate crops. This form of gardening was important for helping to sustain the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs built canals between the chinampas to navigate between them.

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Food sovereignty is a matter of life and death in Gaza, where Israel has been deliberately destroying Palestinians’ ability to sustain themselves.

For Yousef Abu Rabee, from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, farming ran in his blood. He had been doing it from a very young age, the 24-year-old said with pride when interviewed by The Electronic Intifada in September.

But over the past year, many farmers in Gaza like Abu Rabee have had to abandon their land, crops and way of life due to Israeli bombing and evacuation orders. Instead of producing their own food, they, like everyone else in Gaza, have become dependent on the little humanitarian aid allowed in as Israel deliberately destroys Palestinians’ self-sufficiency.

I stumbled on this brief article while looking through this solarpunk blog. On the farm I worked at growing up, all but one of our greenhouses were plastic stretched over a metal frame. We replaced the plastic fairly often (I'm not sure how often - I know I helped do it more than once, but probably not for the same greenhouse) due to sun and wind damage. The old plastic was pretty useless at that point unless you needed a dropcloth with some cracks in it, so it usually went in the dumpster and then to our local landfill.

It sounds like these folks soaked some sort of fabric in beeswax, and I'm curious how well that holds up. Certainly it'll need replacing at some point, but so did the plastic, and at least the textile and wax can be composted eventually. Does anyone have any experience with this?

Researchers around the country are exploring agrivoltaics, or co-locating solar generation with agriculture in a mutually beneficial way. Projects range from growing tomatoes in California to wild blueberries in Maine, with varying levels of success.

Acciona regional manager Kyle Charpie said that sheep grazing appears an especially promising form of agrivoltaics, and one that the company is likely to continue exploring globally. Solar operators need to keep vegetation controlled, and sheep are a more effective and ecological way to do it than mechanized mowing. Acciona has long had a sheep agrivoltaic operation in Portugal, Charpie noted, and two projects in Texas are underway.

A Deep Winter Greenhouse (DWG) is a greenhouse designed to limit the amount of fossil fuel it takes to grow crops during cold winters. DWGs are passive-solar greenhouses that rely on energy from the sun to heat the building instead of more traditional heating sources.

There are a few important aspects of the design that make this possible. DWGs are built in an east-west position, with a glazing wall that faces south. This wall can be specially angled, depending on latitude, to get the most possible solar energy on the coldest day of the year. The sun heats the air inside which is blown underground with a fan and stored in a thermal mass made of rock or soil. This heated thermal mass acts as a heat battery and stores heat for when it is needed at night.

DWGs in can be used to grow crops that thrive with minimal light, providing year-round production capacity for small-scale farmers and gardeners. Crops well-suited to DWG production include a variety of lettuces, herbs, brassicas, Asian greens and sprouts.

Additional resources on building underground greenhouses can be found here (especially at the bottom of the article!)

This article really highlights to me how critical infrastructure is to achieving a sustainable food system. There are plenty of people growing food in an ecologically mindful manner, but they're so atomized that they need to do everything themselves. And the infrastructure is so centralized that you're forced into the industrial model if you want to go beyond the farmer market level. We need more meat lockers, local grain mills, oil pressers, etc. to build out regional food production networks.

Hi there, my chicken has a swelling on her cheek and it's causing her some distress can anyone please advise me?