Solarpunk Farming

Well... it's a start.

Just a few years ago, the Sahel region at the northern edge of Senegal was a "barren wasteland" where nothing had grown for 40 years. But the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and local villagers teamed up to regreen the area, bringing back agriculture, improving the economy of the people who live there, and preventing the climate migration that desertification ultimately leads to.

In a recently published study, researchers offer a new tool to compare how different crops affect the environment in different regions.

Know the climate requirements of your fruits! Know the impact of future climate change on your region! The trees that you plant today will need to endure the climate conditions decades from now.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

Note that future warming is likely to be up to 50% greater than stated in this article.

I have Ostrich fern on the front of my house that I have been waiting years to try. I keep missing the window when they are ready so I was overjoyed when I saw my fiddlehead popping up. I chopped 9, steamed with in a pan with a little butter for 5 minutes. I plated them with just a sprinkle of flaky salt and had them for lunch today.

Conservation orchards, or living collections, for fruit trees serve as a means to preserve genetic diversity while making it available in case of emergencies to preempt threats associated with global changes. Unlike seed banks, these collections provide immediate access to the necessary materials (pollen and flowers) for crossbreeding in varietal improvement programmes, as well as for reforestation and the conservation of wild relatives in forests. These conservation orchards also serve as open-air laboratories to study the response of fruit trees to climate conditions and parasite attacks, as well as the evolutionary and ecological processes that give rise to biodiversity.

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Farming has always been at the mercy of the weather, but recent years have seen unprecedented swings in temperature, rainfall, and storms. Droughts dry up fields, floods wash away seeds, and heatwaves scorch crops. These shifts don’t just threaten harvests—they destabilize farm incomes. Solar energy offers a much-needed anchor. By capturing sunlight, a constant even when the weather is wild, farmers can generate reliable electricity regardless of the season. This newfound consistency helps them weather financial storms even when nature is unpredictable.

Jason Baldes drove down a dusty, sagebrush highway earlier this month, pulling 11 young buffalo in a trailer up from Colorado to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. His blue truck has painted on the side a drawing of buffalo and a calf. As the executive director of the Wind River Buffalo Initiative and Eastern Shoshone tribal member, he’s helped grow the number of buffalo on the reservation for the last decade. The latest count: the Northern Arapaho tribe have 97 and the Eastern Shoshone have 118.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

Global food systems are responsible for around one third of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Agroforestry is recognized as a way to boost local biodiversity, improve soils and diversify farming incomes. New research suggests it may also benefit nearby forests by reducing pressure to clear them.

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By 2020, the global capacity of PV energy had climbed to 760 gigawatts. Much of this came from installations in leading regions like Asia, Europe, and North America. Most systems were built on open ground—often farmland—stirring concern over their effect on food production and ecosystems.

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Dr. Johnson lives in a self-constructed stonehouse in northeastern Arizona up on the Little Colorado Plateau near Kykotsmovi Village, about a 90-minute drive from Flagstaff. This area is a semi-arid environment, receiving six to 10 inches of annual rainfall a year, which isn't much. While conventional crop scientists insist that a farmer needs over 30 inches of annual rainfall a year to grow corn, Hopi dryland farming challenges this assertion. Hopi farming techniques are designed to conserve as much soil moisture as possible. For thousands of years, Hopi farmers have grown corn, beans, and squash in this harsh environment, and Dr. Johnson is working to ensure that Hopi dry farming traditions continue.

El híbrido FHIA-18 del grupo AAAB, es un banano con sabor a manzano, agridulce, similar al Prata Anâ del Brasil. Es rústico y resistente a enfermedades. Se consume fresco y procesado. Se encuentra en producción comercial en Cuba y en Perú.

Our desire to preserve is strongly linked to a narrative of loss, both for biodiversity writ large and for rare heirloom seeds. But we recognize the need for biodiversity and destroy it in the same breath. What if we protected the Amazon instead of just the genetics within it? What if we supported small-scale diversified agriculture instead of industrialized monoculture?

Ancient practices hold important lessons for farmers facing drying lands, but they were often more complex than modern societies realize. Glacier loss adds to the challenge today.

At the foot of Pakistan's impossibly high mountains whitened by frost all year round, farmers grappling with a lack of water have created their own ice towers.

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Traditional methods benefit hundreds of species but as new agricultural techniques take over, the distinctive haystacks mark a vanishing way of life

Hi there. It was requested that I post an update of my chicken after advice was sought for her lesion.

The Great Green Wall in the Sahel, a mosaic of forests, farmlands and grasslands dotting the arid fringes of Sahara, was launched by the African Union in 2007 to fight desertification and land degradation. Stretching from Dakar in the west to Djibouti in the east, the 8,000-kilometer (5,000-mile) “wall” aims to restore 100 million hectares (247 million acres) of degraded land, create 10 million jobs, and sequester 250 million metric tons of carbon to combat climate change by 2030.

A new study published in Ecological Processes by researchers at the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reveals that no-tillage (NT) farming could play a pivotal role in combating soil degradation and enhancing carbon sequestration in arid and semi-arid regions.

I know very little about agriculture and even tho this Farming practices Evidence Library is to my understanding only about monocultures, I wanted some input about it regardless.

Sustainability is sexy.

Crosspost

Our farmers are are going to come into greater need of help in the future. I signed up end of winter got and interview and I start planting onions February 17th I'm super excited to help people eat. I've climbed the Albuquerque food network from JBBC to Mogro to Vida Verde Farm and even to Three Sisters Kitchen and met nothing but beautiful kind people. In my solarpunk revolution everyone eats and they eat well. FTP 🐇👨‍🌾🧅🥔🌄

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.

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.

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

More pix first. Then explanation.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

I saw the need for a community dedicated to hydroponics, and there hasn't been one on the fediverse from what I've seen. So, I just created one 🤷

For those of you who are doing hydroponics, what do you think of this system? Is it a good system for a beginner on a budget? Or is there a better system?

Did you know that simply digging a slight ditch can completely change the health of a landscape?

Vergenoegd Winery(South Africa) is handling pests using a unique solution; ducks. These ducks enable the winery to be pesticide-free.

Super tasty 😊

If you want an easy way to help your local pollinators, then consider building a water station! Many plants and crops rely on pollinators, so the more you attract and help, the healthier your garden will be (for example: "“Bee pollination improves crop quality, shelf life and commercial value.”)

"The rock powder, usually basalt, is often scavenged from local mines or quarries, where it exists as a waste by-product. ERW companies collect the rock powder, sometimes milling it further to reduce the grain size. Then they truck it to farms, where it is used in place of ag lime.

"Findings in both studies showed that the more silverleaf nightshade was mowed, the more it developed ways to avoid destruction, Kariyat said. The taproot went down further, nearly 5 feet deep, in the first generation of mowed plants. More spikes popped out on the stem as a defense against caterpillars feeding on the flowers. The flowers became more toxic to caterpillars, leading to less pressure from natural predators."

For 31 straight days last summer, temperatures in Phoenix hit or topped 110 degrees, the longest such streak ever. That searing Arizona heat dehydrates crops and evaporates water the state needs to conserve.