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.