Double-counting Land Use
I was listening to Listening to a podcast featuring Jack's Solar Garden. The idea is to install solar panels on farmland and then grow shade-tolerant crops below it, or let livestock range and benefit from the shade on hot days. This provides the farmer with multiple income streams: electricity sales and agricultural produce. Agroforestry follows a similar farm-as-ecosystem approach-trees, crops, and livestock grown together can be more productive in the long term than the three grown in separate monocultural areas. (This is partly because the three work symbiotically with soil health. Also, chickens are a pretty effective insecticide and fertilizer, reducing cost of inputs.)
This led me to think about maps and statistics I've seen about land use, which tend to account for just a single use for any given acre of land. You might see an infographic about the percentage of land devoted to cattle, to wheat, to forests, to solar power. This accounting system makes the math easier, but blinds the reader to the possibility of multi-use synergy. Why settle for 20 acres of lettuce and 20 acres of solar when you could have 40 acres of both?
As we combat climate change and account for a rapidly-growing global population, the more creative we can get with the mostly-fixed amount of land on the planet the better chance we'll have of thriving as a human species.
This entry was originally posted at https://flwyd.dreamwidth.org/397954.html - comment over there.
This led me to think about maps and statistics I've seen about land use, which tend to account for just a single use for any given acre of land. You might see an infographic about the percentage of land devoted to cattle, to wheat, to forests, to solar power. This accounting system makes the math easier, but blinds the reader to the possibility of multi-use synergy. Why settle for 20 acres of lettuce and 20 acres of solar when you could have 40 acres of both?
As we combat climate change and account for a rapidly-growing global population, the more creative we can get with the mostly-fixed amount of land on the planet the better chance we'll have of thriving as a human species.
This entry was originally posted at https://flwyd.dreamwidth.org/397954.html - comment over there.