mountaintimefrm

3 jaar geledendiscuss

The most successful form of vertical farming is agroforestry, or tree-based agriculture. It provides habitat, shade, carbon sequestration, and water retention while raising per acre productivity over that of 2-D cropping. Agroforestry is a well studied, widely implemented practice that big talking green tech "big thinkers" tend to ignore if not openly scoff at.

mountaintimefrm

3 jaar geledendiscuss

For some reason they're called "bumpers" instead of "slicers" or "crushers" and frankly I just think that's just a failure of language not being able to keep up with the blazingly fast pace of transportation technology over the decades and decades. /s but not really

mountaintimefrm

3 jaar geledendiscuss

The lady in the vid, Valer Austin Clark, has some great lectures and slideshow presentations on YT if you search for her name and sort for 20+ mins. She built some absolutely massive rock dams that survived some huge floods.

mountaintimefrm

3 jaar geledendiscuss

I've been cell phone free since 2012. Article is correct, it's not that hard to live without one.

mountaintimefrm

3 jaar geledendiscuss

BS'ing

mountaintimefrm

3 jaar geledendiscuss

https://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/01aglibrary/010... this is the way

mountaintimefrm

3 jaar geledendiscuss

What better time than now to start implementing on your farm an agroforestry system based on nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Since 2011 I've been calling it megalobamboozlementarianism.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

I currently move a Salatin-style chicken tractor 12 feet every day, and I could totally see turning this thing into a chicken tractor that moves itself. Bonus points if it could spot sick or injured birds, or identify a problem bird that attacks the other chickens, etc. Or even predator detection/deterrence if a fox or raccoon starts trying to dig under the edge to get inside to the chickens.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

If you use water to compress the air as it goes down, you get isothermal compression. The trompe, which originated in the ancient Catalan forges, has been widely used over the centuries. Anecdotally, a trompe in a mine in Switzerland powered a whole bunch of ~1000 horsepower rock drills, provided fresh air to the underground miners, and powered turbines that generated enough electricity to power a town of about 1500 people.

Here's the vid on trompes I always see come up: https://youtu.be/50fJ8Av_g7Q

I know "free energy" devices don't really exist, but a trompe seems pretty darn close, IMO.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

of all lawns, yarrow lawns are by far the softest, and that silvery color makes everyone go wild.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Playwright is the bee knees. At my last tech job I did maintenance on about 400 wordpress sites, and I used playwright to automate a bunch of monotonous clicky tasks normally done via the wordpress backend gui. It was a lot of fun and toward the end I got playwright running on heroku and made a gui so that my not very tech coworkers could upload a csv of different sites and then and a select a dropdown list of different scrapers, tests, etc.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Interesting, I will look into that.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Too much calcium carbonate is really detrimental to a wide variety of plants, it causes a condition called iron chlorosis. Basically plants will readily absorb calcium instead of iron (they need iron to do their chemistry for photosynthesis), the result of which is yellowing leaves, poor production, plant death, etc. Spraying massive amounts of calcium carbonate in the atmosphere, if it makes it down to the plants on the ground, sounds like a great way to cause massive forest die offs. Much like sulfur creates acid rain, calcium in the atmosphere would create "basic rain" which is just as much of a problem if you're a plant that requires a fairly narrow range of soil pH.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Even low grade geothermal is pretty awesome. Example: "Nebraska retiree uses earths's heat to grow oranges in snow" - https://youtu.be/ZD_3_gsgsnk

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Thanks for posting that link. I took a look at their website and it's reassuring they way they succinctly pitch permaculture: "One collection of ideas and skills that’s already handily packaged and awaiting adoption is permaculture—a set of design tools for living created by ecologists back in the 1970s who understood that industrial civilization would eventually reach its limits." The phrase "already handily packaged and awaiting adoption" is a simple message that could get the point across to policy makers and the public (even though it ignores that there have already been successful permaculture-based ecosystem restoration projects for decades now).

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

I would love to hear what the authors of this paper think about permaculture; not the woo-woo hippie stereotype of permaculture that is so prevalent ("herb spirals", cob ovens, etc), but rather the specific principles and methods outlined in Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (Mollison, 1988). After reading their article , especially the points on creating actionable solutions, I would think they would readily embrace the framework created by permaculture.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

I had a rocket mass heater for a few years and it was awesome - no smoke out the chimney, just steam. I burned sticks raked up out of my yard, pinecones, construction scraps, etc.

There have been a lot of improvements in RMH design in recent years, led largely by the RMH enthusiasts at https://permies.com/f/260/rocket-mass-heaters

IMO traditional metal wood stoves really suck compared RMHs, but they can be made better by routing the exhaust through a stratification chamber (eg a large metal container like a barrel or a old water tank; hot flue gas enters the top, cooler flue gas exits the bottom). Pretty easy to set up next to an existing wood stove, and you get a lot more heat and a lot less smoke out of an otherwise crappy stove.

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

> "Cannabis has by far the highest conversion rate to schizophrenia of any substance"

Quick, somebody call Deleuze and Guattari! /s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoanalysis

mountaintimefrm

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Alternative headline from a saner and more practical world: "Europe's drought might force acceptance of landscape-wide rainwater harvesting earthworks." The effectiveness of such earthworks is pretty shocking to witness: -- https://youtu.be/8QUSIJ80n50 "Lessons of the Loess Plateau"

The permaculture folks have been implementing functional solutions to drought for 3 or 4 decades now, repairing large-scale damaged ecosystems and halting desertification. The problem already has a simple effective remedy, and gene-edited crops are a band-aid non-solution that does nothing to change the underlying conditions by which drought is created and perpetuated.

It is widely understood that forests attract/create rainfall (https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/4/341/346941). Large scale water harvesting earthworks attract/create forests by creating the hydrological conditions amenable to increased vegetative cover. To put it simply, here is what is do be done: an army of people use whatever earth moving equipment they have available (from shovels to machinery) to dig a network of swales and catchments across the landscape, and then plant them with early successional "pioneer" species (sun/drought tolerant, often nitrogen fixing woody shrubs). In 5 to 10 years, the soil will be holding onto to the rain for much longer periods of time , creating the conditions such that longterm forest trees will begin to establish (attracting more rain), and staple crops can be reliably grown. This a proven method, it absolutely works, and it needs to be widely implemented across the globe.

Hopefully this comment get read by the heads of public works agencies of numerous governments in drought affected regions around the world.

comments