Solarpunk Farming

BioPuff, a new plant-based material manufactured by the startup Saltyco using reedmace - better known as bulrush - has a similar structure to feathers, providing warm, lightweight and water-resistant insulation, according to the firm.

About 20 bulrush heads are needed to make enough material for one jacket, and the first rushes are expected to be harvested from the UK site in 2026.

"The bulrush has an amazing high-volume structure," says Finlay Duncan, a co-founder of Saltyco.

"I've been farming this land for 35 years and have seen steadily declining yields and increasing difficulty finding a market for traditional crops," says Steve Denneny, who will be growing the bulrush crop on land owned by the Peel Group.

"Farming on lowland peat can be really difficult. It's not the most profitable farming." Ideas like the bulrush project could mean a lucrative "Win-win", says Longden.

The use of human excrement as plant fertiliser is gaining popularity as a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly alternative to synthetic fertilisers.

There is broad agreement about which 17 nutrients are essential for all plants that's a rather sweeping generalisation), which are: C, H, O, P, K, N, S, Ca, Mg, and Cl, Fe, B, Mo, Zn, Cu, Mn, Ni. Apart from C - as CO2 - and O - as O2 - which plants acquire from the atmosphere, the great majority of their nutritional needs are met from what's found in the soil.

One of the hazards therefore of being a soil-rooted plant is that those nutrients may be in insufficient supply in the immediate vicinity of the rhizosphere to satisfy the plant's requirements for healthy growth.

Mindful of the much-repeated mantra to reuse, and/or recycle waste materials, coupled with an increase in prices of fertilisers as one of the global consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, use of human excrement as an alternative plant fertiliser is back on the radar - at least in Japan.

It should be noted that there's nothing new in the use of human excrement as plant fertiliser, it's something that's been employed for centuries with varying degrees of acceptability in different countries.

Although the focus of this item is human faeces, human urine is the more nutritious in terms of plant nutrients.

What if, just what if, every backyard in the city and suburb, every vacant lot and park and rooftop were farmed as a community of plants and animals, as an ecosystem?

The plant diversity gave a natural beauty to the garden and actually seemed to increase the resiliency of the already established plants.

In the natural world, most plants live in cooperative communities of canopy and understory plants in complex partnerships with the soil biota and the local animals.

Below the canopy of the tallest trees or plants is the understory: a complex mix of woody and herbaceous plants and ground covers of all types living together and, under them, in the soil, rhizomes and bulbs, roots and fungal hyphae, and distributed throughout these layers, the decomposing and the decomposers.

There is no one way of planting, no one list of plants and animals for all of us, even if we live in the same area.

As our climate grows more chaotic, I pay attention to which plants reseed more aggressively, which plants return earlier or later or are heavily laden with fruit.

We needed trees: to anchor the soil, to control erosion and regulate moisture, as windblocks and habitat, as well as food sources and nutrient transport systems to the plant community.

I was going thru an old device and found this bookmarked. It's a great resource if you're into brewing compost teas or would like to get started doing so

In the depleted lands of Brazil, Swiss agronomist Ernst Götsch found fertile soil to imagine and test transformative agricultural techniques.

This is the brainchild of Ernst Götsch, the Swiss agronomist who is transforming traditional agriculture into organic farming in Brazil.

The many young followers of syntropic agriculture are now spreading the seeds of Götsch's concept in training sessions, on social networks and on reality TV. One of the reasons why Götsch's concept stirs so much attention is because he has found a solution to global problems that are becoming increasingly urgent: climate change, soil erosion, species extinction and deforestation.

More recently, large-scale Brazilian farmers have also shown interest in Götsch's cultivation method for economic reasons.

I read this article here, so I thought you'd all appreciate a followup. I pointed out in the comments that they were definitely wrong. I got in touch with them (was not easy to do) and it's finally been corrected.

Editor's Note, July 26, 2023: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that vertical farms can use up to 90 percent less energy than traditional farms. In fact, that number referred to the amount of energy one vertical farm used in comparison to other vertical farms. We’ve updated the story to reflect this change. We regret the error.

The descendants of locals who once cut down trees that bore healing leaves are now actively planting and cultivating medicinal trees.

"There is now a growing interest in people about traditional or alternative medicine. That's why people are now planting medicinal plants in pots at their houses even in the urban areas. For example, if anyone has a cough, they might want to treat it with tulsi leaves. If they have constipation, they might want triphala," he explains.

Centering the cultivation of medicinal plants and the formation of the nurseries in the area, the Kholabaria village market has now become a major national hub of raw materials for herbal medicine.

According to a study, Indo-Aryans noted the use of medicinal plants in the Rig Veda at around 4,500-1,600 BCE. It said that Bangladesh being a country of this Indian subcontinent also possesses a great diversity in plants.

According to the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute, there are 722 species of medicinal plants in Bangladesh compared with 4,000 in India.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2145642

Although agriculture accounts for about a quarter of Uganda’s GDP, agroecological produce is in the minority.

Slow Food Uganda is one of the organisations trying to change that.

“The bacteria is fatal to citrus trees and has decimated citrus groves in Florida and Texas. Now, California growers are holding the line to keep producing the vital crops. As temperatures rise, that gets more difficult.”

EDIT: the tail-end of Wikipedia’s entry points to a Citrus Grower article – seems that cover crops and healthy soil biology seem to help citrus trees weather the disease a lot better

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1443397

With office usage hovering near 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels, cities are putting the underutilized space to new use growing food

To summarize: people have known that cows' methane production can be reduced with an appropriate diet for quite some years. There has been a fair bit of searching for what that diet could be - tropical algae from high seas may produce the right outcome but aren't readily available where the cows graze.

It is nice to learn that daffodils also do the trick, and reduce methane production by "at least 30%" (a cautious estimate, some results using artificial cow stomachs have given a reduction of 96%).

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/337778

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/337776

• Malone farm, managed by Peter Andrews, has successfully coped with the drought by using regenerative agricultural practices.
• Andrews' natural sequence farming methods focus on rehydrating the landscape and slowing down water flow to sustain the environment.
• The farm has seen a 63% increase in production and the return of fish and wildlife due to these practices.
• Tony Coot, a successful businessman, partnered with Andrews to expand the natural sequence farming project across the Malone Creek catchment.
• Through collaboration with other landholders, the project has gained community support and has the potential to be replicated in other catchments across Australia.

This summary was created using www.anysummary.app

Nearly 100 years old and still a decent resource. Able to be downloaded as a PDF or epub. Further info below.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289765978_Tree_Crops_a_Permanent_Agriculture_Concepts_from_the_Past_for_a_Sustainable_Future

J. Russell Smith (1874–1966), a professor of geography at Columbia University, witnessed the devastation of soil erosion during his extensive travels. He first published his landmark text, Tree Crops, A Permanent Agriculture in 1929, in which he described the value of tree crops for producing food and animal feed on sloping, marginal, and rocky soils as a sustainable alternative to annual crop agriculture less suited to these lands. A cornerstone of his thesis was using wide germplasm collection and plant breeding to improve this largely underutilized and genetically unexploited group of plants to develop locally adapted, high-yielding cultivars for the many climatic zones of North America. Smith proposed an establishment of “Institutes of Mountain Agriculture” to undertake this work. For a variety of reasons, though, his ideas were not implemented to any great degree. However, our growing population’s increasing demands on natural resources and the associated environmental degradation necessitate that Smith’s ideas be revisited. In this review, his concepts, supported by modern scientific understanding and advances, are discussed and expanded upon to emphasize their largely overlooked potential to enhance world food and energy security and environmental sustainability. The discussion leads us to propose that his “institutes” be established worldwide and with an expanded scope of work.

• Regenerative agriculture can help farmers transition to sustainable farming and build resilience in agro-ecosystems.
• Trees in regenerative farms act as carbon sinks, mitigate global warming, and contribute to micro-cloud formation in drought-prone regions.
• Regenerative tree-based agriculture improves soil health, conserves natural resources, reduces waste, and limits pest attacks.
• Climate change and industrial farming have led to the loss of millions of acres of India's cropped area, but regenerative practices can potentially reverse climate change.
• Smallholder farmers in southern India have suffered from devastating droughts linked to deforestation, but initiatives like planting diverse trees can restore degraded land and improve soil health.

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/331416

The use of guardian dogs for livestock protection has a long history - farmers have been using dogs to protect their livestock from predators for thousands of years.

Books on agriculture written 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome made it clear that livestock guardian dogs were essential for successful farming and gave detailed instructions on their selection and management.

What if it is just too hard to keep this system working in the long term? Maybe predators initially avoid farms protected by guardian dogs but eventually learn to outsmart or intimidate them and go back to killing livestock; or perhaps farmers find guardian dogs too difficult to manage in the long term and give up on them.

Some farmers gave up on guardian dogs because of two kinds of problems: 24% had trouble with dog misbehaviour, and 19% had trouble with neighbours who objected to the presence of these dogs close to their own farms.

From the answers, we estimate that farmer-to-farmer contact is increasing the total number of Australian farms with guardian dogs by 5% per year.

Anyone has experience with this? There seem to be some contradicting opinions on it.

cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/43649

Removing weeds is a chore few gardeners enjoy, as it typically involves long sessions of kneeling in the dirt and digging around for anything you don’t remember planting. Herbicides also work, but spraying poison all over your garden comes with its own problems. Luckily, there’s now a third option: [NathanBuildsDIY] designed and built a robot to help him get rid of unwanted plants without getting his hands dirty.

Constructed mostly from scrap pieces of wood and riding on a pair of old bicycle wheels, the robot has a pretty low-tech look to it. But it is in fact a very advanced piece of engineering that uses multiple sensors and actuators while running on a sophisticated software platform. The heart of the system is a Raspberry Pi, which drives a pair of DC motors to move the whole system along [Nathan]’s garden while scanning the ground below through a camera.

The Pi runs the camera’s pictures through a TensorFlow Lite model that can identify weeds. [Nathan] built this model himself by taking hundreds of pictures of his garden and manually sorting them into categories like “soil”, “plant” and “weed”. Once a weed has been detected, the robot proceeds to destroy it by concentrating sunlight onto it through a large Fresnel lens. The lens is mounted in a frame that can be moved in three dimensions through a set of servos. A movable lens cover turns the incinerator beam on or off.

Sunlight is focused onto the weed through a simple but clever two-step procedure. First, the rough position of the lens relative to the sun is adjusted with the help of a sun tracker made from four light sensors arranged around a cross-shaped cardboard structure. Then, the shadow cast by the lens cover onto the ground is observed by the Pi’s camera and the lens is focused by adjusting its position in such a way that the image formed by four holes in the lens cover ends up right on top of the target.

Once the focus is correct, the lens cover is removed and the weed is burned to a crisp by the concentrated sunlight.

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/218266

• The document discusses the negative impacts of externalities such as global warming, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, which are not currently accounted for in accounting procedures.
• It emphasizes the need to understand and implement ecological principles in land use and farming practices for sustainability.
• The author calls for Australia to learn from history and not repeat past examples of human land occupation.
• The document highlights the importance of understanding and respecting the ecology of the land, as well as the limitations of the land itself.
• It suggests that farming practices should be based on natural and free resourcing of land and water systems, rather than relying on purchasing ongoing inputs, in order to benefit the whole biological community and repair failing ecology.

This summary was created using www.anysummary.app

https://landsmanship.com/

https://landsmanship.com/publications-for-download/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Sequence_Farming

preferrably sustainable business ventures.

I am in the position to acquire some land with a forest on it in Germany. What could I do with it so it pays for itself in the long run and pays a decent and sustainable profit