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)
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.