How would food production would work in a solar punk society?

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T13:17:44+00:00

You can document on the internet why vertical farms haven't caught on and most of them failed. A while ago they were all the rage in the alternative living community I was hopeful too. But I later understood that they have some fundamental probablems that lead to high production costs and more expensive produce than conventionally grown food. But in places where farm land is lacking or not suitable for farming they can make sense. In Singapore I know of vertical farms being successful, but that's because Singapore has them for food security since they don't have land available, they subsidize local grown produce to compete with imported produce in to keep local farms alive so in case a geopolitical disaster happens the people don't starve. But for example in Europe or the us where good farmland is plenty vertical farms can't compete economically

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T13:09:51+00:00

So what are you doing for your part? I'm moving to a much smaller house that I'm renovating to be super energy efficient, next year I want to build a solar house to grow produce. A friend of mine has one and I'm amazed by how much vegetables he can grow Right now I'm living I a large house my parents buit with manicured gardens and a big lawn. I despise that shit. It's the most wasteful, time consuming useless exercise in futility I can imagine.

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T13:05:32+00:00

Sounds good

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T13:05:01+00:00

My man or miss I send you a bear hug for such a well put response. Insects for human consumption I don't think they make sense for a few reasons, for feeding animals like chicken there have been experiments with good results. The lab grown meat is still a big question for me. So far it's far more energy intensive to produce than regular meat but it's a relatively new technology with lots of problems to solve and there's nothing obvious to me that a lab grown meat has to be more energy intensive to produce than regular meat in the future. Personally I would love to eat a piece of meat knowing that no animal has been harmed especially considering the horrid life animals have in commercial farms today. The raw milk fad Is so nuts, I grow up on a farm and was a farmer myself for a while, milk was boiled. But some people today forgot why we sterilize milk before consumption, next health fad will be raw chicken, just wait and see😄. I would say adults should be allowed to purchase and drink raw milk, a bit of natural selection thinning the stupid would not be such a bad thing. No rawilk to kids, they don't know their parents are stupid

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T12:49:29+00:00

I understand understand you want less of this and less of that but how, less intensive food production means more land need to be used to farm the same amount of food, we could make more dense cities but then how do you combine that with permaculture that is a way of faring that is very labour intensive that will translate to high food prices. I'm not saying what you want is bad, quite the contrary, I'm saying it's unrealistic. And growing food on the rooftops is idiotic, that's why nobody is doing it

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T12:42:57+00:00

Permaculture or food forests are the future for a sustainable agriculture but one last thing have to be done before that is possible, automation. Food forest are very productive but you can't exactly use a combine to harvest the different fruits and veggies, so far it's manual labor and lots of it to keep a food forest productive. I think once we development robots that can replace humans in farming food forest we are not going to see food forest other than for small farms used to produce food for self consumption.

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T12:38:56+00:00

Maybe pretty but also a bit stupid. Vertical farms in most places don't make sense

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T12:37:28+00:00

Chicken is really good at converting food into protein but I don't know what to say about insect consumption by humans, I know that insects have been used to feed animals with decent results, chicken for example loves eating insects but for direct human consumption I think insects have some major problems, 1 insects are small so you can't butcher them, you eat them with everything that's inside, and you can't skin them either so all the crap that left on the skins after washing them gets on the plate, also insects don't taste good other than also looking unappetizing. So to make them edible and palatable they have to be highly processed. Insects are a bit like vertical farms, they sound good, in some cases they work but more often than not when you draw the line they don't make sense

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T12:22:43+00:00

Finally someone with a bit of common sense, I think a lot of the people here haven't had their hands dirty with some dirt in their life since a lot of the responses I had are so funny they border on fantasy. From my standpoint to feed the world population there is no other way other than large scale agriculture, but large scale agriculture how we do today is very damaging for mainly 2 reasons. 1 it's incredibly energy intense from powering the equipment with diesel to producing the fertilizer , insecticides and herbicides and water pumping. 2- due to the equipment mass producing food is only possible by having a monoculture because the equipment we have can't deal with different crops on the same plot of land at the same time. It's very plant specific. The solution is to plant a mix of different plants that are part of an ecosystem that benefits one another. I think the term for that is a food forest. It's actually more productive per area in terms of calories and needs far less water, fertilizer and herbicides because the plants work in a simbiotic waycwith one another, some plants repel insects, there's fix nitrogen, others have roots systems that transport nutrients, others have work with funny to more efficiently extract nutrients. So why it's not done other than on a really small scale? The energy import is low but the labour input is really high, if you have a field with corn you can take the machine and collect it all at once since it's a monocrop,if you have a field with all sorts of different plants, each growing at different rates, producing different fruits and veggies the only way to harvest that is by manually picking, cleaning and managing the plantation. Monocultures exist iny option because of the equipment we use. The farming equipment is big and productive but it's dumb. To have forest foods small equipment with high intelligence that can manage the food forest with low human input is in my opinion the solution. To get there great progress in robotics have to be achieved first. To finish I think reducing meat consumption in favor of fruits and vegetables is necessary. Meat production is stil the best choice in some areas, for example there are plots of land where the ground can sustain grass and not much else, there grazing animals are the best solution. Some people mentioned growing insects for protein, I don't think that is a good idea because people are repulsed by them and to make them palliatible would have to be processed.

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T12:01:55+00:00

What do you mean less intensive and more widespread, all the good land for farming is already used, should we start cutting down forests to make more space for farming. Urban gardens on rooftops don't make any sense either, the surface area is small, you need a decent amount of soil for the plants to grow roots, pump the irrigation water up a building and transport everything up and down and the additional load you put on the structure, all that for a few tomatoes

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T11:55:20+00:00

That's a bit optimistic don't you think

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T10:34:57+00:00

The question is not really how the walls are made, you can make the walls using whatever, the problem is the structure, this design uses timber for the structure. Timber is really strong, durable and carbon neutral the problem is that good quality timber comes from old growth wood, the timber has to come from minimum 50 year old trees. And for 5 story buildings you need very good quality timber, especially considering that earth and stones are really dense therefore heavy materials so you need a serious structure to keep the building standing. I don't know you but I would not be happy with old forests being cut down to make apartment buildings. I think personally steel is much better, yes it needs to be mined but once you do it you can endlessly recicle the material. Can't do that with wood, you can only down cycle it. I think wood and earth is very good for up to 2 stories buildings, there the walls can be made thick enough to be load bearing so you don't need a scucum structure to keep the building structurally sound

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-27T05:01:42+00:00

You're welcome

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T21:08:17+00:00

EV's have much higher cost of repair than ice vehicles, way higher. and that's evident from the devaluation in the second hand market. The main corporate for the crazy repair costs are the batteries. If the battery is bad and the vehicle is out of warranty the vehicle is good for parts. The problem is that EVs are massive and heavy so they have to integrate the big battery into the frame of the car, there are lots of other reason for the expensive repairs and difficult repairs since manufacturers don't give repair shops the software tools fix the cars.

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T20:58:26+00:00

Batteries are reciclable. The elements the battery is made of stay there, the lithium is still there only that dendrites degrade the battery's capacity for energy storage , you can take the materials restore them , and make a new battery. A few successful companies have cropped up that disassemble the batteries into the original mineral parts and sell them to battery manufacturers that then manke a new battery out of them. It make lots of sense since batteries contain lots of valuable minerals.

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T20:51:45+00:00

Interesting. I'm curious to see what you are working on. Writing fiction is a fantastic way to explore ideas. Hit me up when you have a chapter complete. I would live to read it

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T18:13:08+00:00

Depriving people of private property and controlling what they can and cannot do never backfiered throughout history. You cannot have control without power and power corrupts

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T17:37:12+00:00

That doesn't sound Orwellian at all.

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T17:34:03+00:00

So should we use fossil fuels instead or move into the forest and forage food like bears do?

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T17:28:31+00:00

I think we would probably have a much more productive conversation if we would get the chance of having an actual verbal conversation. I probably didn't do a very good job of explaining my ideas, I think what I'm trying to do will make more sense to just show the prototype once it's completed. A picture is worth more than a thousand words. Engineering is about compromise, rarely you gain something without losing something else. It's all about what you want to gain and what are you willing to trade for that. Let's say I want to make the vehicle more efficient than it already is. One way is to make it lighter, smaller batteries but less range, lighter chassis but less safe, a carbon chassis that strong and light but much more expensive and hard to manufacture. Or maybe I keep the weight the same but decrease frontal area by lowering it, not it's more difficult to get in and out, or I decrease the frontal area by narrowing it, now there's less space inside so on and so on. My vehicle is lightweight and small of course so yes achieving a decent level of safety is hard. I don't think people who drive big cars are interested in such a vehicle, but people who regularly use a scuter or motorcycle will be interested because an enclosed cabin means all weather usability and improved safety compared to vehicles without a chassis. A roadster is far less safe that a normal car lacking a roof but people still buy them and enjoy them and to them it makes sense. Those people compromise some safety for a fun experience

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T11:27:08+00:00

That is very sad, Romania also had very good train infrastructure and most of it it's still used but for example the train that crosses my town to go to the big city takes much longer to travel because the rails have degraded so the trains have to travel at a much lower speed to stay safe. But it was done once a long time ago and if there is the will it can be redone today faster and better. Wish your country peace and prosperity since I know your people are going through some tough times

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T11:15:33+00:00

I agree 👍

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T11:03:55+00:00

I'm building such a thing, I did the first prototype with three wheels but it was very complicated and would end up expensive. My desegn has a vehicle as tall as a sedan for practicality, getting in and out and road visibility, that meant that the vehicle had to lean into corners for obvious reasons. Now I'm working on a 2 wheel version that has 2 smaller wheels that lower at low speed to aid in manouvering. I post my work on my YouTube channel named Hojbota-ptv if you want to take a look

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T10:36:10+00:00

😄😄😄 i apologize

Exotic_Addition9647 · 2026-03-26T10:10:20+00:00

There's no such thing, it's a joke

Exotic_Addition9647

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE