Solarpunk Farming

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24795783

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

Great work by Tess Colley, an award-winning environmental journalist. Emails & documents she obtained through the Freedom of Information Act have exposed how this & other alarming warnings have been sat on for years.

This follows Rachel Salvidge's story where a water industry insider described sludge as "a Trojan horse" with toxic contaminants (PFAS, microplastics etc) threatening "the long-term sustainability of humanity’s farmland".

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/07/toxic-sewage-sludge-british-farming-pfas-chemicals

Came across this book, so I am sharing in case anyone needs it

Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/accessiblegarden0000adil/mode/2up

The herbicide ingredient used to replace glyphosate in Roundup and other weedkiller products can kill gut bacteria and damage organs in multiple ways, new research shows.

The ingredient, diquat, is widely employed in the US as a weedkiller in vineyards and orchards, and is increasingly sprayed elsewhere as the use of controversial herbicide substances such as glyphosate and paraquat drops in the US.

But the new piece of data suggests diquat is more toxic than glyphosate, and the substance is banned over its risks in the UK, EU, China and many other countries. Still, the EPA has resisted calls for a ban, and Roundup formulas with the ingredient hit the shelves last year.

Desemboque del Seri, a community in northern Mexico, has seen stunning results after installing solar panels in family vegetable gardens.

Verónica Molina, a member of the indigenous Comcaac community, has led the charge, according to Inter Press Service. After learning about solar farms in India in 2016, that experience inspired her to change how her community functioned.

This change has allowed Molina's community to save money and live in a healthier environment. While this technology is relatively new to Mexico, Molina's work has the potential to revolutionize how many people live.

"With the panels, we pay less for energy, and with the gardens we save money on vegetables," Molina said in a translated statement to IPS.

• A new comment article published in Nature Climate Change makes the case for more forest-based agroforestry — integrating crops into existing forests — as an underutilized climate and livelihood solution.
• The authors find that there’s a noticeable lack of funding for forest-based methods compared to field-based agroforestry, in which trees are added to pasture and croplands, which they say has led to missed opportunities for carbon storage and biodiversity.
• A lack of consensus and understanding on how to define agroforestry is another factor in the misalignment of intentions and outcomes of agroforestry as a climate solution.
• The authors call on policymakers and scientists to fund and study forest-based agroforestry methods with more rigor, especially in places where people depend on rural livelihoods such as agriculture.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Mongabay article
• Nature Climate Change article

Ricoh, a Japanese multinational imaging and electronics company, unveiled its initiative to source some of its headquarters' electricity with its first-ever off-site Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) power plant in a press release.

Notably, Ricoh has already powered its headquarters with 100% clean energy. The company says that through this move, it "aims to deepen its environmental impact while further contributing to local sustainability."

The PPA will leverage agrivoltaics, where solar panels are used in harmony with agricultural land. The power plant is hosted on repurposed farmland and will be led by local farmers with support from Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22005567

cross-posted from: https://gregtech.eu/post/7551752

A daunting realization

Engkalas gotta eat.

Tucked into a corner on the second floor of the Field Test Laboratory Building, the plants were housed in two custom greenhouses. Six were exposed to the full solar spectrum, serving as a control to the six plants grown under less light. The reduced sunlight reaching the other plants was filtered through purplish panels so that only the spectrum most beneficial to the tomatoes would reach them.

The experiment was meant to prove the effectiveness of what is called a BioMatch, which enables the exact spectrum of light that best suits the physiological needs of the plant to pass through organic semiconducting materials found in solar cells. Now in the second year of the multi-disciplinary project known as “No Photon Left Behind,” the researchers determined limiting the spectrum made the tomatoes grow faster and bigger than those under direct sunlight.

“When light comes into contact with a plant, there are a lot of things that can happen. Different physiological pathways are triggered based on the type and amount of light. Those physiological pathways often determine productivity of the plant,” said Bryon Larson, an NREL chemist with expertise in organic photovoltaics (OPV) and principal investigator on the project. “We are studying what happens to plants when sunlight is filtered into only the spectrum and dose the plant needs, which is the plant light requirement, and we can produce that through the concept of BioMatched spectral harvesting, while using the light plants don’t need to make electricity with transparent OPV modules.”

I have most of my plants in hydro, but especially my carnivorous plants need (Sphagnum) moss to grow.

It, and peat, just has the right, unique properties to ensure the CPs thrive that cannot be replaced by other substrates.

Sphagnum in particular can for example replace minerals and turn them into acid, creating a mineral-free, highly acidic environment many bog plants have evolved to live in.
Sadly, both sphagnum and peat are mined extremely destructively, which is why I wanna grow it myself.

But I also find all kinds of mosses just beautiful and they make a great top dressing, for example for my Pinguicula. I do not only grow Sphagnum sp., but also Hypnum sp. and many other different kinds I can't identify myself. But they look cute tho 😇

(I shot the pics in the forest)

Here's a Drosera, a peat bog plant, that I tried to grow in LECA alone. It didn't even take a month and it was dead. The ones in peat thrive tho.

(I added the live sphagnum a week ago in hopes it will revive it)

Here's my process:

I take a transparent box and add a few centimeters of LECA, which has been soaked thoroughly, because mosses are pretty sensitive to leftover minerals.

Then, I add distilled water just right below the surface. It is always kept wet by capillary action, while the moss sits above and gets hydrated.

The moss is plucked apart or cut with a pair of scissors. Every tiny leaf will grow to the original form it came from.

Then, the box is placed in a bright spot. Just make sure it isn't too hot, like it happened in my parents' greenhouse :(

Before:

After a too hot day (it was steamingly hot):

(Forest stew, yummy!)

If you grow it indoors, a sunny spot behind a curtain is great.

I will soon lightly spray fertilize it when I see good new growth, but be careful, it's very sensitive to too much salts.

I just started this project about one week ago, and I can give you an update in a few months if you're interested :)

I got the samples from nearby. The sphagnum is from a neighbour hobbyist with a bog garden, and the other mosses from forests in my surroundings. Make sure you respect your local wildlife when collecting.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• phys.org article
• research cited

every additional degree Celsius of global warming on average will drag down the world's ability to produce food by 120 calories per person per day

"If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that's basically like everyone on Earth giving up breakfast."

When an adult male is unable to obtain at least 2100 kcal per day, the WHO considers that a famine. Either the above excerpts assume that breakfast accounts for only a small portion of daily calories, or (if breakfast accounts for even close to 1/3 of daily calories), the human population is, on the average, in a state of severe famine all of the time. Or both.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Morning frosts have hit Serbian fruit production hard, mainly affecting early stone fruit varieties.

In the Čačak region, experts from the Institute of Fruit Growing report that 95% of apricot crops have been destroyed.

The damage varies by location, with Vojvodina experiencing more than 90% loss in lowland areas, while areas near Belgrade show 40-50% damage.

Cherries and pears have also suffered, with a complete damage assessment expected by the end of April.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Archived link of the article

A community to discuss fruit trees, fruit forestry, fruitarianism, and all things fruit-related.

Post photos of your fruit trees or harvests, share growing information or interesting articles, ask questions, or just express your appreciation for fruit in general!

Hosted on slrpnk.net, an instance with an ecological and anti-capitalist focus.

Fruit trees provide many ecological benefits – they are trees, after all! A properly-stewarded fruit forest can provide many of the benefits of a native forest while also providing an abundance of wholesome and delicious food! No tilling the soil, no killing the plants at harvest time, and no wasted vertical space. Fruit trees are also the gift that keeps on giving, producing food for decades and producing seeds and other propagation materials in order to spread the abundance, no profit incentive needed! Share with your friends, share with your neighbours, share with the birds – you'll have so much food, you'll be giving it away! Shifting to a tree-based agriculture would also free up a huge amount of land, allowing native forests to regrow, which would have an enormous benefit for the climate. Fruit trees are the ultimate win-win situation!

/c/fruit@slrpnk.net

!fruit@slrpnk.net

https://slrpnk.net/c/fruit