Solarpunk Farming

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

While agrivoltaics in vineyards isn't novel, the extent to which SolarWine leverages the panel's capabilities to adapt to the weather is unique.

SolarWine uses machine learning to guide the folding panels on when to provide needed shade for the grapes or take in excess energy. The panels can also be used as protection against heavy rainfall and wind. It all amounts to a win for farmers, who can control the weather and generate passive income as they do it.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Carbon Brief article
• research cited

The UK's strawberry season is off to a "stonking start", according to one grower, with warm days and cooler nights meaning they are sweeter than usual.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Related: Farm has earliest fruit harvest in 50 years

Recent weeks of hot weather have given one fruit farm its earliest season in more than 50 years.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Significance

The productivity of staple crops is a key factor shaping the affordability of food and the amount of land and other resources used in agriculture. We synthesize evidence on how the weather faced by these crops has changed and how these changes have affected productivity. Most cropping regions have experienced both rapid warming and atmospheric drying, with significant negative global yield impacts for three of the five crops. Models can largely reproduce these changes and impacts with two important exceptions—they overstate warming and drying in North America and understate drying in most other temperate regions. These insights can help to guide adaptation efforts and model improvements.

Abstract

Efforts to anticipate and adapt to future climate can benefit from historical experiences. We examine agroclimatic conditions over the past 50 y for five major crops around the world. Most regions experienced rapid warming relative to interannual variability, with 45% of summer and 32% of winter crop area warming by more than two SD (σ). Vapor pressure deficit (VPD), a key driver of plant water stress, also increased in most temperate regions but not in the tropics. Precipitation trends, while important in some locations, were generally below 1σ. Historical climate model simulations show that observed changes in crops’ climate would have been well predicted by models run with historical forcings, with two main surprises: i) models substantially overestimate the amount of warming and drying experienced by summer crops in North America, and ii) models underestimate the increase in VPD in most temperate cropping regions. Linking agroclimatic data to crop productivity, we estimate that climate trends have caused current global yields of wheat, maize, and barley to be 10, 4, and 13% lower than they would have otherwise been. These losses likely exceeded the benefits of CO2 increases over the same period, whereas CO2 benefits likely exceeded climate-related losses for soybean and rice. Aggregate global yield losses are very similar to what models would have predicted, with the two biases above largely offsetting each other. Climate model biases in reproducing VPD trends may partially explain the ineffectiveness of some adaptations predicted by modeling studies, such as farmer shifts to longer maturing varieties.

archived (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22446624

Have you ever had an especially rewarding, adventurous, dangerous, or really stupid experience of harvesting/foraging fruit?

I tend to live a sheltered life, so I don't have anything too exciting to share. I've harvested bananas with a hornets' nest on the underside of a leaf multiple times, but nothing unusual ever happened. I've gone wading through the swamp looking for aguaje, but the anacondas had already been hunted to extinction in that area. I've stood under a fruiting durian tree without a helmet, but it seems that durians don't just fall from the sky when I'm hungry.

Does anyone have an exciting or uplifting story to share?

WASHINGTON COURT HOUSE, Ohio (AP) — Stubborn drought in Ohio and the shifting weather patterns influenced by climate change appear to be affecting North America’s largest native fruit: the pawpaw.

Avocado-sized with a taste sometimes described as a cross between a mango and banana, the pawpaw is beloved by many but rarely seen in grocery stores in the U.S. due to its short shelf life. The fruit grows in various places in the eastern half of North America, from Ontario to Florida. But in parts of Ohio, which hosts an annual festival dedicated to the fruit, and Kentucky, some growers this year are reporting earlier-than-normal harvests and bitter-tasting fruit, a possible effect of the extreme weather from the spring freezes to drought that has hit the region.

Take Valerie Libbey’s orchard in Washington Court House, about an hour’s drive from Columbus. Libbey grows 100 pawpaw trees and said she was surprised to see the fruit dropping from trees in the first week of August instead of mid-September.

“I had walked into the orchard to do my regular irrigation and the smell of the fruit just hit me,” said Libbey, who added that this year’s harvest period was much shorter than in previous years and the fruits themselves were smaller and more bitter.

archived (Wayback Machine)

No longer breaking news, but it will probably be just as relevant in the years to come.

Crop insurance is a lifeline for farmers. But research shows it's not ready for climate change.

archived (Wayback Machine)