Solarpunk Farming

If you prefer to read, here's an article: https://extension.arizona.edu/sites/extension.arizona.edu/files/pubs/az1911-2021.pdf

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

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.

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%).

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.

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

The pitch for vertical farming had all the promise of a modern venture capital dream: a new way to grow crops that would use robots and artificial intelligence to conserve water, combat food insecurity and save the environment.

But after firms poured billions of dollars into these startups, pushing valuations into the stratosphere, the industry is now facing a harsh new reality: funding is drying up, profits remain elusive, and creditors are circling.