It’s time for one of my Community Discussion Posts ™! How do y’all picture the food supply working in a solarpunk world?
It’s very difficult to feed people on homesteading alone (especially since most solarpunk focuses heavily on cities) so I would imagine that there would still be some kind of large-scale agriculture. Any improvements we could make to get farming on that bigger level to be better for the environment? What about the actual distribution of grain and fruit and what-have-you? As much as you might want to stick to local produce, some ecosystems are just naturally better for growing foodstuffs.
Also, I imagine that there would be some kind of distribution system to get meals or supplies to people who for whatever reason aren’t able to run hydroponics systems/maintain gardens/etc.
vertical gardens that allow the general public to help maintain and take for meals.
I would say the gardens most definitely have extremely large windows for sunlight, and different conditions on each floor for different produce (given the fact that not everything works best in the same conditions).
They would be as common as grocery stores. One or even more in every town depending on the need. Also I imagine there would be some that specialise in specific foods (plants that grow specifically in one area and are used as the majority of a culture’s food) sort of like how we have “Asian food stores” now.
Elaborating on vertical gardens, they can be further optimized with integrating them into an aquaponic system.
These systems can be further optimized with other food production systems:
And once again we can go a step further with my own design for an advanced river system for raising a variety of aquatic species
Full slideshow: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Uq3KGzC-7BjZlFgYuFpwAywehBvgAUmnjSOc0xdsEbs/edit?usp=sharing
Kansas - centerpivot irrigation is pulling up water from an ancient aquifer
Carbs are a big problem though, they don’t make sense in vertical gardens. I hopefully assume some stuff will just be produced in vats, by manipulating molecules. Think about how much land is used to graze animals, and how much additional land is needed to supplement the diets of those grazed animals. Now imagine that instead, you could grow most of that stuff in vats - the carbs, the protein, the whole lot of it. The vats could be in or near urban centers, where the transport costs could be low. What if you could even have your own personal small vat for household consumption? A Star Trek style replicator, if you will.
Bulgaria - this used to be forests
Meanwhile, the land that was previously intensely managed for humans / human consumption could be all ecological habitat restoration / rewilded. All manner of plants and animals could have way more space on the planet to grow, unlike today’s constant drumbeat of habitat destruction and ensuing extinction.
Brazil - this used to be rain forest, it’s now soybeans grown for animal feed
It’s very hard to imagine the sheer scale involved. Here’s a little something from the FAO, the ag/snack wing of the UN:
“Livestock is the world’s largest user of land resources, with grazing land and cropland dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80 % of all agricultural land. Feed crops are grown in one-third of total cropland, while the total land area occupied by pasture is equivalent to 26 % of the ice-free terrestrial surface.”
Those are MASSIVE numbers. Growing lettuce and spinach in vertical farms is great, but very very little land, water, and nutrients in use is actually used to grow vegetables anyway.
Here I tried to make a chart to help visualize things better:
Those vegetables are a mere sliver in the dark green pie piece. The dark green pie piece also includes things like olive, coconut, corn, rice, wheat, things grown on large scale for oils for your salad dressing or the wheat for your bread.
Better look at centerpivot irrigation. The tiny blue stuff in the foreground is the roofs of houses. The issue here is one of SCALE.
Iowa - this used to be wild prairie
Missouri/Kansas border - note the little green circles, the centerpivot seen above
Arkansas/Tennesse border. The dark section in the middle, a wildlife refuge, gives you an idea of what the whole area used to look like.
Arizona irrigating the desert
