The weather in New England today is sunny, but crisp. I couldn’t imagine a better day to work outside. This means it’s a great day for some solar farming.
Solar farming? That’s what I call working on my home’s garden.
Here’s what I mean.
My home’s garden runs off of solar energy. It captures it and converts it into delicious vegetable calories that I can harvest. My family eats stored solar energy when I feed them the vegetables produced by my garden. Finally, in a pinch during a future long emergency it could become a source of income, since I could barter some my garden’s produce for things that I need.
I love this and you should too.
Solar energy doesn’t cost anything. It’s delivered to us directly, without any intermediaries, and while it can be variable, it’s on the whole, extremely plentiful.
To the extent we can capture it and put it to use, we’re not dependent on a predatory global economy or government to:
- price it,
- ration it, or
- determine the quantity available.
This means that if our homes and communities are good at solar farming, we gain resilience. Solar farming provides us with the productive capacity needed to quickly bounce back from the growing amount of dysfunction and breakage in the global system.
Solar Farming
You’ve probably already guessed that solar farming is bigger than just growing food.
It’s about finding and exploiting ALL of the ways to capture and store the solar energy available to us.
Growing food is only one way to do that.
Other ways include solar energy to heat your home through passive solar capture, or cool your home through geo-exchange air conditioning. It’s also about generating electricity, through inexpensive solar thermal systems or directly through photo-voltaics (PV).
Thinking in terms of solar farming is the way to turn a passive decorative home of little value in an economic crunch or disaster into a dynamo of value. It becomes a productive asset. One that produces value in a way that is constantly replenished.
Our ancestors understood this. They relied on solar farming to power their farms and farming communities.
However, they used only a small fraction of what was available to them. Solar farming in the resilient communities we are building will capture thousands of times more solar energy than they did and will generate thousands of times the quality of life, prosperity, and independence.
I’ll have more on solar farming tomorrow.
Your happy to be a solar farmer analyst,
John Robb
PS: If you like this letter please send it to your friends, kids, parents, and co-workers. The more people that read it, the better for all of us.
