Solarpunk Farming

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28002750

• Land restoration in Burkina Faso’s Centre-Ouest and Kadiogo regions is women’s work.
• Here, women have made fertilizer trees their indispensable allies in reviving farmland.
• Thanks to these nitrogen-fixing and shade-providing trees, they’re bringing degraded soils back to life.
• In Cassou and Bazoulé communes in Centre-Ouest, local women are breathing new life into an ancestral technique that boosts productivity and enriches biodiversity.

Maan Tagnan has planted several varieties of fertilizer trees in her field, including Albizia stipulata, Ferruginea and white acacia (Faidherbia albida). The acacia, known locally as zaanga, is revered by agroforesters, Zouré says. “It’s an off-season tree that sheds its leaves during the rainy season and provides shade in the dry season, making it essential for maintaining soil fertility in agroforestry systems,” he says.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27726079

Growing tall trees to provide shade for cocoa plantations in west Africa could sequester millions of tonnes of carbon, according to a new study.

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"As a farmer, you're always at the mercy of weather," says Harpal Dagar who has a farm on the outskirts of Delhi.

"So many times, we lost our produce due to unpredictable conditions," he says.

But five years ago he was approached by Sun Master, a Delhi-based solar power firm, with a deal that would give him a much more predictable income.

Sun Master proposed building solar panels above some of Mr Dagar's fields, with the panels high enough off the ground, that he could continue to farm underneath them.

Under the 25-year deal, Mr Dagar would receive annual payments and Sun Master would keep the proceeds from the electricity generated.

"When the solar company first approached us... many of us feared losing our land. It sounded too good to be true - maybe even a scam," says Mr Dagar.

"But today, I believe it was the best decision I made. My income has tripled, and I sleep peacefully without the stress of climate or crop failure," he says.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27367245

What are you doing, or what do you want to do, or what do you think that people should do, in order to achieve food security and avoid the most severe impacts of the worldwide trend toward cost-of-living crises, resource depletion, tariffs and trade wars, impediments to migration, accelerating climate change, and so on?

Are you currently producing your own food? Do you think that you're secure where you are, or that you will be in a few years, or do you plan to move somewhere else?

Do you forage? Dumpster dive? Do you share food with friends and neighbours? Do you trade services for food?

Just wondering who is out there and how they're managing...

“I think that we have been just fooled, scarred, traumatized into thinking that healthy food is just for privileged people,”

urban farming is here to stay, and it can change the way people experience food altogether

• 0:00 An Unusual Enemy
• 5:18 Monsanto’s Secret Poison Problem
• 11:17 Vietnam and Agent Orange
• 14:08 Roundup
• 19:31 How Monsanto controls seeds
• 24:20 ADVERTISEMENT
• 26:02 The Crop Mafia
• 31:10 The Monsanto Papers
• 41:18 How dangerous is Roundup really?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27231323

• Bananas make up one of the largest tropical fruit export chains, with 20 million metric tons of bananas exported annually; a whopping 100 billion bananas are eaten globally each year.
• According to a recent study, the area suitable for export banana production in Latin America and the Caribbean could be reduced by 60% due to climate change and other factors, such as population density and distance from ports.
• Research highlights that countries located in the Global South may find it more difficult to adapt to climate change than wealthier countries due to a lack of resources.
• Although the study focuses on large, intensive banana plantations, researchers say small farmers could also be affected by climate change; however, they may be more resilient to climate shocks because they often use a production system that values crop diversity.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Mongabay article
• research cited

The researchers conclude that among the climatic factors they analyzed, temperature would be the only factor responsible for the loss of suitable areas, as the increasing temperatures will be harmful to banana yields. “This is particularly the case in dry regions, or regions which will become dry. In addition, extreme events such as hurricanes and storms can damage production, for example the Caribbean,” Bebber says.

The analysis is based on a scenario in which there would be no labor migration, port expansion or irrigation in the future. Therefore, the climate crisis will likely cause the areas most suitable for banana production to become more distant from regions that currently have sufficient irrigation and population density to guarantee labor, as well as becoming more distant from ports, which are essential infrastructure for the export chain. According to Bebber, “to continue production in these new suitable areas, we’ll have to ensure we have sufficient irrigation (in some places), workers, and transport infrastructure.”

From the abstract of the study:

We found that intensive banana production is constrained to low-lying, warm aseasonal regions with slightly acidic soils, but is less constrained by precipitation, as irrigation facilitates production in drier regions. Production is limited to areas close to shipping ports and with high human population density.

Areas at reasonable elevations with sufficient year-round rainfall will remain suitable for non-commercial banana production for many years to come. Continue planting bananas in your food forest... just don't rely on only one kind.

In the wake of Maria, many residents of Puerto Rico, especially those working to improve the archipelago’s local food system, began to think about hurricane preparedness differently. Because they weren’t able to rely on federal assistance, they decided to build their own prototypes of resilience, which didn’t just set them up to be ready for the next storm, but also set them up to live better everyday lives.

Cooperatives, gardens, and school-based agricultural programs emerged to fill the gaps left by the government. Barter networks and local farmers markets have become increasingly popular. Mutual-aid kitchens and community-led supermarkets have also expanded their work, ramping up donations, surplus food, and partnerships with nearby producers.

These projects aren’t just temporary disaster responses. They are models of long-term resilience and food independence. They are living blueprints of what food sovereignty could look like in Puerto Rico — and elsewhere.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27122330

This page continues the explanation: https://rainforestsaver.org/how-to-and-the-science/

related information:

• Agroforestry
• Abundance Agroforestry
• An Illustrated Guide to Agroforestry
• Natural succession of species in agroforestry and in soil recovery

Syntropic food forests are the way to go. The forest produces abundance, if only we are willing to work with it.

A summer vegetable garden is the closest many Americans will ever get to agriculture. In the spring, they prepare the soil before planting the seeds. In June and July, they water the shoots, weed the spaces around them, and worry about insects, slugs, and blights — and whether they should use chemicals to kill them. If they’re lucky, August brings an overflow of produce, so much, for some, that they now feel guilty about food gone to waste.

Growing food is hard and chancy work. It’s something of a miracle that we’re able to feed more than 8 billion people. When we do see famine or hunger, politics are more to blame than agriculture. In the coming decades, however, the odds of success will get longer. We’ll need to feed another two billion people under increasingly hostile climatic conditions.

This daunting new challenge has proved fertile ground for a new crop of books about climate change and agriculture, the focus of this month’s bookshelf.

I found a project that seems cool.

We are Pangaia, a small solarpunk farming community in the Amazon region of Peru. We aim to use permacultural traditions and methods to recover soil health on a farm that has been used for grazing cows and is completely degraded.

Many neighboring farms have been investing in fish farms or cattle, thus completely reshaping the land, destroying soil fertility and increasing CO2 as well as methane emissions.

We want to reverse this trend and empower small farming communities like ours to be part of the fight for climate justice.

In Pangaia, we value anti-oppression veganism and food justice as important pillars in the fight for social change. Our community has chosen the path of cooperation not only because of the overwhelming evidence for it but also because it brings out better qualities in ourselves. We are fortunate to be somewhat isolated from the claws of capitalist greed. This gives us the possibility of nurturing our altruism, solidarity and empathy, human qualities that are too neglected in patriarchal capitalist societies. Our community tries to place equal value on individual as well as our collective well-being. We are in a constant process of learning and unlearning, of setting aside old maps to draw them anew. It is not an easy path, but this time we know we have new stars to guide us, and lead humanity towards a shared future.

We are in the process of constituting a Cooperative of producers and consumers, as a way to implement solidary agriculture. Our aim is to produce for home consumption and for the consumers that are integrated in the cooperative.

Our dream is to contribute to the creation of a sustainable and fair food system, through the practice of permaculture and community supported agriculture. We are creating, seed by seed, a vibrant edible forest, in which a big variety of local species thrive on regenerated soil.

EDIT: They are on Mastodon: https://masto.es/@runa_pangaia

Crosspost from !mosses@mander.xyz

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

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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.