#farming

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

Strange maps and even stranger maps are collected here.

[coolthingsguyslike]

[kedreeva]

If you're in Wisconsin and looking for (or can take and process) meat birds, or know someone who can, there's a Situation going on:

The producer company just decided they didn't want the birds anymore and left the farmers that raised the birds a few days ago high and dry with no food coming in beyond what they had on hand. They've been working with locals have been organizing to get the birds out and processed so they don't suffer.

W21462 Holcomb Coulee Road, Galesville, WI 54630 --Sunday 10/13/2024 12noon-6pm Valarie Dianne

N47656 CTH-Y, Eleva WI, open during daylight. AT LEAST 25,000 in this barn And 23,000 more. Daylight Hours. (Dawn Filla)

W166 Highway 10, Mondovi Wisconsin 54738 (open any time during daylight) - About 2,000-3,000 birds remain for Sunday 10/13 starting at 9am.

Greg Marten’s Barn- W284 County Road HH Mondovi : (Julie Marten)- 25,000+ left pick up starts; Sunday 10/13/24 6am

I'm not close enough to help but hopefully this can reach folks who are.

[lovelolla]

[doglover43]

i will never stop loving sheepdogs we truly do not deserve them

[seizethenightagain2]

Farmer Ben Andrews 🤩🤩💜💜

What a superb specimen of masculinity 💜

The things I’d let him do 💜😈💜😈

Source: Instagram @ bentheoandrews

[reasonsforhope]

"In some cities, as many as one in four office spaces are vacant. Some start-ups are giving them a second life – as indoor farms growing crops as varied as kale, cucumber and herbs.

Since its 1967 construction, Canada's "Calgary Tower", a 190m (623ft) concrete-and-steel observation tower in Calgary, Alberta, has been home to an observation deck, panoramic restaurants and souvenir shops. Last year, it welcomed a different kind of business: a fully functioning indoor farm.

Sprawling across 6,000sq m (65,000 sq ft), the farm, which produces dozens of crops including strawberries, kale and cucumber, is a striking example of the search for city-grown food. But it's hardly alone. From Japan to Singapore to Dubai, vertical indoor farms – where crops can be grown in climate-controlled environments with hydroponics, aquaponics or aeroponics techniques – have been popping up around the world.

While indoor farming had been on the rise for years, a watershed moment came during the Covid-19 pandemic, when disruptions to the food supply chain underscored the need for local solutions. In 2021, $6bn (£4.8bn) in vertical farming deals were registered globally – the peak year for vertical farming investment. As the global economy entered its post-pandemic phase, some high-profile startups like Fifth Season went out of business, and others including Planted Detroit and AeroFarms running into a period of financial difficulty. Some commentators questioned whether a "vertical farming bubble" had popped.

But a new, post-pandemic trend may give the sector a boost. In countries including Canada and Australia, landlords are struggling to fill vacant office spaces as companies embrace remote and hybrid work. In the US, the office vacancy rate is more than 20%.

"Vertical farms may prove to be a cost-effective way to fill in vacant office buildings," says Warren Seay, Jr, a real estate finance partner in the Washington DC offices of US law firm ArentFox Schiff, who authored an article on urban farm reconversions. 

There are other reasons for the interest in urban farms, too. Though supply chains have largely recovered post-Covid-19, other global shocks, including climate change, geopolitical turmoil and farmers' strikes, mean that they continue to be vulnerable – driving more cities to look for local food production options...

Thanks to artificial light and controlled temperatures, offices are proving surprisingly good environments for indoor agriculture, spurring some companies to convert part of their facilities into small farms. Since 2022, Australia's start-up Greenspace has worked with clients like Deloitte and Commonwealth Bank to turn "dead zones", like the space between lifts and meeting rooms, into 2m (6ft) tall hydroponic cabinets growing leafy greens.

On top of being adaptable to indoor farm operations, vacant office buildings offer the advantage of proximity to final consumers.

In a former paper storage warehouse in Arlington, about a mile outside of Washington DC, Jacqueline Potter and the team at Area 2 Farms are growing over 180 organic varieties of lettuce, greens, root vegetables, herbs and micro-greens. By serving consumers 10 miles away or less, the company has driven down transport costs and associated greenhouse emissions.

This also frees the team up to grow other types of food that can be hard to find elsewhere – such as edible flower species like buzz buttons and nasturtium. "Most crops are now selected to be grown because of their ability to withstand a 1,500-mile journey," Potter says, referring to the average distance covered by crops in the US before reaching customers. "In our farm, we can select crops for other properties like their nutritional value or taste."

Overall, vertical farms have the potential to outperform regular farms on several environmental sustainability metrics like water usage, says Evan Fraser, professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and the director of the Arell Food Institute, a research centre on sustainable food production. Most indoor farms report using a tiny fraction of the water that outdoor farms use. Indoor farms also report greater output per square mile than regular farms.

Energy use, however, is the "Achilles heel" of this sector, says Fraser: vertical farms need a lot of electricity to run lighting and ventilation systems, smart sensors and automated harvesting technologies. But if energy is sourced from renewable sources, they can outperform regular farms on this metric too, he says. 

Because of variations in operational setup, it is hard to make a general assessment of the environmental, social and economic sustainability of indoor farms, says Jiangxiao Qiu, a landscape ecologist at the University of Florida and author of a study on urban agriculture's role in sustainability. Still, he agrees with Fraser: in general, urban indoor farms have higher crop yield per square foot, greater water and nutrient-use efficiency, better resistance to pests and shorter distance to market. Downsides include high energy use due to lighting, ventilation and air conditioning.

They face other challenges, too. As Seay notes, zoning laws often do not allow for agricultural activity within urban areas (although some cities like Arlington, Virginia, and Cincinnati, Ohio, have recently updated zoning to allow indoor farms). And, for now, indoor farms have limited crop range. It is hard to produce staple crops like wheat, corn or rice indoors, says Fraser. Aside from leafy greens, most indoor facilities cannot yet produce other types of crops at scale.

But as long as the post-pandemic trends of remote work and corporate downsizing will last, indoor farms may keep popping up in cities around the world, Seay says. 

"One thing cities dislike more than anything is unused spaces that don't drive economic growth," he says. "If indoor farm conversions in cities like Arlington prove successful, others may follow suit.""

-via BBC, January 27, 2025

[bathtub-frog]

Did you know in some languages lady beetles are called god's little cow. I think about that often.

[todaysbird]

writing this piece served as an (unwelcome) reminder that we will likely see much less transparency around pesticides + negative impacts from chemicals generally in the next 4 years. exercise caution, do your own research, and advocate against 'solutions' we know to be harmful.

[backroad-life]

Credit: Backroad-life

[systlin]

do hobbits even exist at this point in time?

We don't fucking know!!!

Legit we have no idea. Maybe proto-hobbits do exist, minding their own business over in what will become Eriador. I like to imagine them getting into spats over Who Should Inherit Granny's Good Teapot while over in Beleriand there are balrogs and dragons and desperate battles and all that.

Or maybe they don't yet! No idea! An ongoing Thing in the books is that no one really knows where the hell hobbits came from. The elves are baffled. The dwarves don't know. Humans have no idea. Hobbits themselves think that it's not important, or at least not as important as discussing the finer points of the weather and how it will affect the potato crop.

[froggyforest]

[retrogamingblog2]

[probablyasocialecologist]

The global food economy is massively inefficient. The need for standardized products means tons of edible food are destroyed or left to rot. This is one reason more than one-third of the global food supply is wasted or lost; for the U.S., the figure is closer to one-half. The logic of global trade results in massive quantities of identical products being simultaneously imported and exported—a needless waste of fossil fuels and an enormous addition to greenhouse gas emissions. In a typical year, for example, the U.S. imports more than 400,000 tons of potatoes and 1 million tons of beef while exporting almost the same tonnage. The same is true of many other food commodities and countries. The same logic leads to shipping foods worldwide simply to reduce labor costs for processing. Shrimp harvested off the coast of Scotland, for example, are shipped 6,000 miles to Thailand to be peeled, then shipped 6,000 miles back to the UK to be sold to consumers. The supposed efficiency of monocultural production is based on output per unit of labor, which is maximized by replacing jobs with chemical- and energy-intensive technology. Measured by output per acre, however—a far more relevant metric—smaller-scale farms are typically 8 to 20 times more productive.

5 November 2024

[doglover43]

the partnership sheepdogs and their herds share is so interesting to me. the way these two species are able to care for one another as family is truly remarkable