I’m mostly asking because I posted a photobash of an airship yard I did to the solarpunk subreddit and someone brought up combining airship mooring masts and screw conveyors like grain silos use (though we might be closer to concrete-industry-scale once you lift stuff to mooring-mast-height). A combined mooring mast and silo might be practical in a place with a lot of flavors of agroforestry, where they might not want to clear a patch of empty land just for landing airships.
It got me thinking about grain silos and how they’d fit. I know folks on this instance generally don’t like industrial scale farming and monocrops, which is what I generally associate with grain, but I know so little about it. So I guess my questions are pretty broad and open to correction - could the mooring mast/silo idea work in a society with a lot of airborne shipping, what’s a solarpunk way to grow those crops? Anything you’d like to see in art of farming? (I’m still working on the scene of the village, which includes all the suggestions from last time)
There’s a lot of problems with industrial ag and monoculture, but I don’t think the way that we store and process the grain is really a problem. There’s a few different things that a lay person might call a “silo”. The taller/skinnier ones are actually silos or grain elevators, which can be used for grain storage. If you see one out on a farm, though, it might be more likely that it’s for storing silage. As far as i know, there’s no reason you can’t have many types of plants mixed into your silage, and having larger quantities in one space makes the fermentation work better.
The shorter/wider silo looking things are “grain bins” for getting grain to the right moisture content. They basically have a screen on the bottom that dry air is pushed through to dry grain and preserve it.
Obviously, we want as much small scale, local agriculture as possible, but part of having a climate resilient system will probably always involve silos.
Thanks! This is really good information! Grain also seems to play a role in mitigating famines by serving as a sort of strategic food reserve - so it seems like even a solarpunk society with a focus on local agriculture and balancing their production to limit waste may want the means/surplus to provide for their global neighbors in hard times.
I had no idea about silage silos, which yeah, probably are most of what I see around here. Would grain silos be more centralized?
IMO silos are even more important with small farms and crop rotation. Imagine a silo is shared by the community, and they co-ordinate rotations so that the silo continues to get filled as is it used. Not only does this make society resilient to bad years, but also individual harvests. The silo also discourages accounting, so it’s whatever the community can produce and whatever they need.
I don’t know much about agriculture, but I’m French, which means 1/ I love bread and 2/ we need storage for the winter months. Grain silos are cool, as far as I’m concerned.
Yay world building! Here’s my two cents of what I watch people do and what I learned they used to do from where I live: Here’s traditional grain silos from Northern Portugal. You can see from the crosses on top that grain (or ‘pão’, bread) is very important - sacred to the people. There’s still so many religious festivals where the locally grown grain is central and the catholicism might have been added later, and this kind of underlines how desperately important grain is to people. The funny stone discs keep mice and other pests away (some feature that is essential for any grain silo, ancient or modern!). There’s openings in the walls because you cannot seal the storage hermetically - it needs a certain air flow against mold. Some villages have one per family, but I think there were communal ones as well, just as there were (still are in some places) communal ovens where the grain was turned into bread (broa de milho). In ancient times these ‘espigueiros’ were used to dry millet, then maize got introduced from South America and that’s what people grow still today.
I know very little about actually growing grain, haven’t done so myself other than a little maize. But when you imagine a landscape which grain is grown makes a difference: there’s summer grain (maize, wheat) and winter grain (rye). Some grains are more water hungry - maize is notoriously so, and the current situation here is that people pump a lot of water to grow it and that it’s not great when you already fight with drought. I don’t know how millet compares to that, nobody grows it anymore. Rye you can seed in late autumn and then leave it alone, no extra water needed. It can cope with temperatures under 0°C. Wheat I have never grown.
All grains give you their straw as byproduct, which has a million uses from animal bedding to basketry.
I imagine that a modern grain agriculture would (re)introduce grain to helpful companion plants (and other organisms). Companion plants protect from pests and keep the soil healthy. So instead of creating a dead landscape with our grain agriculture where we kill everything on the field that is not a grain, we would try to find plants or other organisms that can protect each other, maybe even for a harvest of different crops from the same field, like 3 sisters. Grain field size would be limited, instead of 1000s of hectares with only grain you would have rows of trees: fruit crops, wood crops, … , in between the grain. This invites birds who will take care of many pests that would otherwise threaten your grain (although you will have to negotiate with the crows I guess, they will definitely want a share of your grain! Maybe you could call your local crow befriender and they’d make some kind of deal in your behalf?)
… oh and i forgot to nerd out at least a little about regional varieties of grain: when I moved here, I was gifted a few ears of corn, both local varieties. They do well here in the mountains and don’t require as much care (as in nutrition, soil preparation, pest control) as an industrial variety. They are also beautiful.
The article about the short corn reminded me of the importance of local varieties. A lot of plant and animal breeding efforts in industrial agriculture have aimed at varieties with nothing but madly large outputs, no matter the insane input the crop needs - because subsidies in many countries have mostly favored fossil-fuel supported, large scale stuff. And so some smart people like those in the above article have now figured out that chickens who cannot walk and corn who cannot stand might not be so great after all, when there were and are local and heirloom varieties available that are adapted to certain conditions and require a much smaller input.
This is all awesome information, thank you for diving in! I’ve definitely got some more reading to do!
And it’s definitely worldbuilding - hopefully folks don’t mind me posting questions around the instance almost weekly, but it’s been really helpful for figuring out scenes before I draw them, and for building this setting in my head. I’m hoping to dive in on short fiction again soon. Plus when I see the same questions over on the subreddit I can link them to everyone’s answers. I’m hoping this will kind of build a resource for writers planning their solarpunk settings.
I do not know too much about grains either, but you can do intercropping with grains. Milpa for example often involves maize. Also barley and oat can easily be grown on the same field and have been for a long time. Also rotational cropping works very well.
At the same time perenial grains are a thing and they are amzing. Grasslands are extremly good at capturing carbon and transfering it into the soil. That can store tons of carbon. However that only works with perenial grasses and they are rarely used as food today, but it is an option.
Yeah, it sounds like I can make a pretty good case for it if I do do a scene of a silo surrounded by grain. Intercropping and crop rotation and their role in resiliency are worth discussing.
I’d never heard about perennial grains and now I have some stuff to read up on! Thank you very much!
Honestly the biggest way I would see it being used in a Solarpunk future would be the use of it as a community storage method.
