I was outside looking at the garden and contemplating the future of agriculture, when I noticed the locusts
tldr upfront: Move agriculture to underground LED farms and use the land for renewable energy, while also rebuilding the topsoil
(edit for artist's rendition of the concept)
With weather paterns going to absolute shit, the era of modern agriculture (aka the practice of using toxic pesticides and inorganic fertilizers on eroded soils) is finally coming to an end and can possibly take industrial animal farms with it. I used to think only herbs and smaller produce such as lettuce would be grown in vertical LED farms; now I am convinced everything, including staple crops such as potatoes and wheat, should be moved indoors. Here's how it can be done:
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Dig parallel tunnels underneath current agricultural fields
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"Plant" solar PV panels on the topsoil
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Use vertical LED farming practices to grow everything inside the tunnels, and power the entire thing through renewables
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Use grazing herds to keep weeds in check on the PV side, which will rebuild the topsoil, including bacterial life, and help fight soil erosion
story time:
It's been a particularily wet June in southern EU, and every time the weather gets all rainy like this, you'll hear gardeners complain about the blight killing their tomato patches. Now, luckily, this year it only rains at night for some reason, so the blight was mostly kept in check (leaves rot easier when it's both humid and hot/sunny).
The locusts though, they seem extra plump this year. They are well fed and watered, the lush foliage of the tomato patch provides them food and cover and by the time the usually-drier July rolls on, there will be an army of them. They'll have chomped through the strawberry patch earlier than that, of course. I give it a couple weeks before geotextile and leafless stems are all that remains of it.
It got me thinking that it's not just the lettuce and strawberries and herbs like parsley that will need to be cultivated under artificial lighting and in sterile envrironments. Things are about to get so biblical on the surface, that we will have to move most of our farming operations indoors. This will allow us to use current fields for solar PV and will allow the topsoil to rebuild under the PV panels, especially if used in conjuction with grazing herds field maintenance.
Rebuilding the topsoil across former agricultural fields would have the added benefit of soil microbial biomass increase, which is a massive carbon sink.
Posted Jun 19, 2019, 10:13 AM UTC · edited
All these risk factors can easily be mitigated (for far, far less costs) with a greenhouse and organic pesticides. We do it every year in the states (SC to be exact).
Your plan works with the assumption of energy being prevalent, but with the thought in mind that energy will be hard to harness or even not available it gets harder to operate. I’ve been able to keep tomatoes producing from April-October from a single planting using a greenhouse, hard pruning method, single string trellis, which allows you to lower and lean. Literally our plants were well over 20ft tall. All it costs was the initial set up and labor. Our kale and collards lasted from November to March the following year.
I can say by far growing in an enclosed system such as a greenhouse is easy and manageable from a for profit standpoint.
Greenhouses are usually light constructions that don't allow for mutli-level growing such as in vertical farms and you use the sunlit space for the plants themselves, instead of producing energy.
Placing the plants underneath the surface also buffers your temps close to ~18 degrees celsius year round, which means you can be producing food year round. Greenhouses get hot in the summer and cold in the winter. In general, they offer a small improvement to current agricultural practices and do nothing to protect the topsoil.
Walipini greenhouses use the Earth’s internal temperature to regulate as you’ve stated. Vertical growing can be as easy as growing on the sidewalls as well as on ground level. In a regular above ground greenhouse cooling is as easy as rolling up side curtains or end walls. For winter cold many different farmers have had no problem with wood burning stoves or the like, but it will take a little ingenuity to get heat dispersed evenly. Then again it’s best practice to just grow what grows seasonally in your climate. Our spinach and kale stands up to below freezing with ease.
Producing your own energy is easy to say on paper, but in reality is much harder unless you have unlimited start up funds. The sun will never go away and has always been more than enough to satisfy plants since the beginning of time. Over engineering farming leads to a broke farmer with a lot of useless equipment. As the adage goes, Keep it simple stupid.
Simple is planning for as many unknowns as possible at once underground does this a Faraday cage is next and combined living quarters plants scrubbing the co2
Greenhouses can use very simple geothermal heating/cooling systems to be productive year-round, like this guy growing oranges in Nebraska.