81–90 of 103 posts
I'm not sure if it would work out cheaper. Certainly not for a business. But even for a hobbyist possibly not. I'm not sure it's even interesting as a display garden.
The bio-hacking (breeding) of plants is cool though.
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Permaculture in general sadly does not produce at scale at all and scaling up is very labour intensive.
You need to look at the work of Mark Shepard. His work is all about farm scale permaculture. He has a book Restoration Agriculture you can find on Amazon, etc.
Permaculture is nice and I would like to see more of it adopted, but I don't see at all, how we could feed the current world population with it. With general ecologocal farming, yes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Permaculture in general sadly does not produce at scale at all and scaling up is very labour intensive.
The average car in the US has a 120 horsepower engine, less if it's a compact, more if it's a truck or SUV. Think about that for a second -- your garage is housing the equivalent of 120 horses. How much "labor" is that? Now, we don't really notice that when everything is working well and the gasoline keeps flowing. There are calculations that figure a gallon of oil has something like two weeks of 8-hour/day manual la…
Not it is not. A horse needs food, also if it is idle. A car does not.
And labour does not equal energy. The advancement of humanity did happen, because we found other energy sources and apply them, so machines can do the hard labour.
(now it is a struggle to adjust that system, but I believe globally the sun is excessively shining to provide all the energy we need)
"I'm a developer not a farmer, but the systems-level thinking I've seen in the permaculture community is extremely fascinating"
And to this I agree very much, but I would still rather bet on more traditional ways of feeding the world.
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The problem is that neither your chimney nor hot water pipes are continually piping heat. So the transient effect of the warm/cold cycles would likely make frostbite even worse. ...and leaving those heat sources on continually... well... that's very energy inefficient, to say the least.
Idea behind the brick is to add thermal mass -- it stays hot once it gets hot in the same way a freight train stays in motion once it gets going. This is often done on north-facing walls in greenhouses. In winter when the sun is low, the thermal mass gets a lot of light and absorbs it as heat. Then at night it releases it to balance out nighttime lows. In summer when the sun is high up, because it's a wall there's le…
And a lot of land area.
That last part tends to be the problem.
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The problem is that neither your chimney nor hot water pipes are continually piping heat. So the transient effect of the warm/cold cycles would likely make frostbite even worse. ...and leaving those heat sources on continually... well... that's very energy inefficient, to say the least.
The brick works as a thermal battery - if it's cold, you're heating your house, and the intermittent exhaust is keeping the brick warm. If you're not heating, well it's not cold so the brick temperature doesn't matter much.
But: we need to build low energy housing to manage climate change. That means there is very little waste energy available. Last house we built was 230m2, family of 5, had a total energy consumption, including everything from heating to water to home electricity, sitting at 8000kWh/y. That's in southern Sweden (N58deg).
There is no relevant amount of waste energy available.
This is the kind of housing we'll need to meet future energy targets.
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Incredibly laborious. Pretty much everything has to be done by hand -- watering, fertilizing, etc. Totally worth it for specialized plants, or in certain climates, but you can't scale them to feed 6-going-on-7 billion people.
There are in fact about 7.8 billion of us. I believe we will have to change from this Growing part of your own food is a good idea. We should all plant some potatoes this year – a not so laborious way of producing nutritious food.
Yours,
David Ricardo
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food security in times of disaster or emergency are other good reasons for investing in local food supply. Also, diversification of the economy. But ya, it needs to make some economic sense too. We grow a lot of food in hothouses in Canada...
I would love to see the math of geothermal greenhouses powered by renewables versus the carbon footprint of air freight of food. As renewables drive down the cost of electricity, the economics continually shift towards local production versus import. Outside of Alberta, most of Canada's electrical generation is very low carbon (nuclear and hydro) per electricitymap.org.
https://usgreenchamber.com/how-iceland-is-revolutionizing-gr...
Slowly developing insulated indoor aquacultures, led lighting, robotic harvesting, perfect climate control, gas mixture, mineral and nutrients.
With near future robotics we'll see near zero carbon footprint production with near zero human work load for a fairly wide range of healthy foods.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Permaculture in general sadly does not produce at scale at all and scaling up is very labour intensive.
The average car in the US has a 120 horsepower engine, less if it's a compact, more if it's a truck or SUV. Think about that for a second -- your garage is housing the equivalent of 120 horses. How much "labor" is that? Now, we don't really notice that when everything is working well and the gasoline keeps flowing. There are calculations that figure a gallon of oil has something like two weeks of 8-hour/day manual la…
That said, I think there is a lot of interesting stuff in permaculture design. But in a lot of cases it is a bit of a pyramid scheme / agile consultancy feel going on.
If the temps are below 0f, it seems like none of this is preventing your free from dropping below freezing. Maybe it’s really more about the varieties they cultivated. With modern crisper I bet you could Make some amazing frui trees.
But some plants are very tricky and costly.
I remember making my first transgenetic GMO in an afternoon back in the day.