Solarpunk farming (just one approach of many, not vegan mind you)

As promised, here’s a few lines about how farming could look in SP future.

Water

No water, no crops. Ideally, farms are built nearby water, but at some point you will need channels to get water to farms. Like Levadas, that are still used to this day. Water use is often regulated by the local community and can be point of dispute.

Other ways to transport water, pump water or draw it from wells: ram pumps, which points to water as energy source: where you have no naturally flowing water, you can store your water in higher places (natural or constructed reservoirs), for later energy harvest and irrigation. It’s already done in huge scale, but solarpunks can use smaller scales with less impact for their surroundings!

Soil

As much as others might go into the advantages of hydroponics (and it might have its applications in some settings), I’m more of a soil person. Soil is life. Or at least it should be full of life if you treat it right. What people in the Amazon did with soil, you can do at home. Hügelkultur is another mystical name for a very simple thing: Pile up your organic matter, add some shit, wait a while, plant on it. It’s just a really lazy==efficient, circular way of gardening, as many traditional people have done worldwide before they got lured into fossil fuel madness.

Mushrooms

Solarpunk farms need so many mushrooms! I’ve managed to add Turkey Tail logs to my garden beds and grew Oysters on a straw/manure mix from my horse shed. Learning to do more.

Animals

They are great, because they turn organic matter into manure for your garden. They clear and clean land in different ways - horses and sheep keep herbs low, goats and donkeys keep bushes and hedges in check, pigs clear a place completely and dig the soil, free range chickens, geese and guinea fowl do general maintenance by keeping plants short where other animals don’t go and eat ants and ticks. This system works if enough space is available for all and you can achieve a higher density by a high diversity of species.

Diversity

It’s important, it’s what makes the thing work. Monoculture in species, culture, field, forest, family, … **does not work. It’s a lie. You can however wildly mix equine, fowl and other beasts and a great number of trees, plants, fungi, microbes, mix up everything in your farm and field and garden, and it will thrive. Learn to use your diversity - some is food, some is medicine, some is bedding, some is stored sunlight … In a healthy strong biodiverse place even so-called invasives learn their place and will find their use. Nutrition might look a little different from the food pyramid. I don’t think we were ever meant to eat soo many cereals anyway, or the same cereal again and again. So big grain fields make space for smaller different grain fields with flowers in them because bees like them, and hedges and trees all around. Much more gardens, with fruit trees in them. So basically we’ve been told that the landscape is only efficient when treated in a huge scale way and homogeneized(?that even a word?), and from my current farming experience (and that of so many other people it turns out to be a lie).

Machines

Avoid, they are so noisy and the animals don’t like them. But sometimes you have to. So where no-till is not an option, you could use animal power - your equine will quickly figure out that their help is needed to grow treats or draw water, so they will not mind lending you a strong shoulder. (I’ve watched a few astonishing videos on yt about working animals left with a surprising degree of autonomy. Unfortunately a lot of what’s left of Western animal teaching traditions is military based, not working based, so it’s filled with sadistic and authoritarian shit - but I’ll keep this rant short for now, it gets too specific.

And renewables. Energy transfer as direct as possible should be the rule. Solar thermal, maybe even solar steam power, might be preferred over photovoltaics in many cases, as the tech might somewhat easier - we already use steam engines for a lot of shit, we might just boil the water in a smarter way.

Hydropower as in water mills, wind power obviously (just look at some traditional mill constructions, nice and reliable low tech. Also, there are some 19th century workshops still in working order that can be visited. Seriously, this place made me drool. Obviously we wouldn’t return to 19th century working conditions and not slave in a place like this 19 hours a day to make someone else rich. But a couple of hours service in the next town to produce a series of farm tools, I’d totally enjoy that! So, back to farming, hehe.

Landscape

Farmers need to know how the landscape works. Water runs down here and not there, wind blows a certain way, animals like to graze here in the morning, there in the evening, some places want to remain wild … people used to know these things, we have to re-learn them.

Community

A farm or some parts of a farm could work as a community setup (I guess it used to be a thing in the past considering there are still common lands, agricultural cooperatives (where some processing of harvest needs more tech than one farm can afford). A lot of farms used to work as family business, and if your family doesn’t suck that can be a neat arrangement - so in a solarpunk utopia travel between farms would be an encouraged thing, and young people might do it as part of their coming-of-age, and find a place to settle. Already exists a litte, and that’s how I started the farming lifestyle myself and so can you

Hard toil, back-breaking work all day

Nah, I don’t buy it. When you don’t have to make other people rich and when you don’t try to squeeze a profit out of your land and instead try to coexist with all creatures who are content to share a place with you, your life is rather easy. Word of caution: This does not mean you can give up your urban existence now and buy a farm - or well yes you can, but the learning and watching and setting up takes time, and current dystopian conditions limit the lengths to which you can build your paradise. Some of the above is inspired by examples from my actual farm, so it’s all based on possible things, but the entire thing describes an ideal state that could be an achievable possibility in maybe one or a few generations - as in our current state we are all noobs. I mean, I’m dependent from tech as fuck, I’m in no way self-sufficient (European way of living doesn’t really make that very easy), but I try to learn and combine the elements in a way that I can be lazy as fuck and enjoy my life - and from my feeble attempts I gather that it’s not that hard once you understand the basics.