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)
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!