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)
… 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.