Ace of The Lost Empire

In the US we grow FAR MORE CORN THAN WE CAN CONSUME OR EXPORT. More than what people and livestock will eat. We grow so much corn that we keep having to invent new ways to use that corn. We have a minimum requirement for ethonal mixed into our gasoline in spite of it burning less efficiently because we have so much corn that we need to fucking burn it.

We grow this much corn because at some point the US decided the best thing to do to save farms if they grew a crop but the market for that crop ended up fucking sucking at the end of the season was to pay those farms subsidies so they could make up the loss and just keep on keeping on.

And then investment firms went oh shit, an investment with a guaranteed government backed return? Yes please! And started snapping up farmland. So now huge swaths of US farms are corporate owned, investment firm backed entities that bear little to no actual relationship to food production needs of domestic or international populations in any way shape or form. They just keep on growing commodity crops because it's an easy return.

Agrovoltaics is actually a fascinating area of tech that could potentially revolutionize farming. I have considered it myself! I raise mostly sheep. sheep eat grass out of big grassy fields. Solar panels provide shade to those sheep without really impacting the grass. leave a wide enough space between rows to run a tractor and I can hay the fields too. Attach a catchment and storage system to the bottoms of those panels and now rain and snow run off in the wet season can be used to irrigate the fields in the dry season without impacting our already threatened aquifer.

Flashy memes like the ones above are propaganda slapped together by people with a motive or little to no understanding of farming, and often times both. A lot of anti agrovoltaic rhetoric perpetuates the myth started by an oil exec that solar panels are simply ALWAYS leaching horrible toxic chemicals at all times! My friends, they're mostly metal and glass.

In conclusion: cover car parks, canals AND fields! just do it smartly!

Brenda Song talking about the iconic "PRNDL" scene from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody in the year 2025!