
What Does It Mean to Lose Power on a Farm? - dredmorbius
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/opinion/pg-and-e-power-farmers.html
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ncmncm
PGE is not cutting power to prevent fires. That is proven by their cutting
power in places where there was no unusual wind -- almost everywhere they cut.

PGE wants to extort free indemnification from the state against their own
gross negligence. The right response would be to confiscate PGE's assets, and
turn them over to somebody who will actually be a responsible public utility.
Public Utility Districts have demonstrated an ability to do that in many
places, Sacramento included.

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rwmurrayVT
For our chicken farm it can mean the backup generator comes on or we lose many
thousands of chickens quickly.

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dekhn
I wonder how people farmed before power.

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ncmncm
Without refrigeration, without automation, and with 50 times as much labor.
Want to be a farmhand, substituting for electric power? You could draw water
from a well in a bucket and carry it to the pigs.

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dekhn
What I should have said: all farms should be able to run without power for
limited times (several days) and not collapse. if you depend on external power
to pump water, where is the battery backup?

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dredmorbius
Farming is a phenomenally low-capital industry. Its primary inputs are
sunshine, water, and turned soil. Where capital _is_ applied, it's not
landscape-wide, but generally small and mobile equipment: tractors, combines,
harvesters, etc. This includes much of the irigation infrastructure, which
tends to be simple unlined ditches, rarely pipes and hoses (though
increasingly used in water-scarce areas).

For water delivery, stockpiling a gravity-fed reservoir would be far more
technically conservative a solution than requiring battery or generator-backed
pumps. Build an elevated reservoir, and ensure that it is topped off as power
is available. Note that this requires land dedicated to the reservoir, and
some predictability as to power availability and interruptions.

The supplemental powering of irrigation was among the very first cases of
mechanised activity, whether supplied by people, animals, wind, or eventually,
coal, fossil-fuel, and electrically-powered pumps. This is a major element of
Vaclav Smil's books _Energy and World History_ and _Energy and Civilization_.

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ncmncm
Farming as practiced in the US involves quite a lot more capital than was once
common. A single combine harvester, for example, may cost a half-million
dollars, and a typical farm operates several.

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dredmorbius
Sure.

But just as an apples-to-apples comparison, look at the capital requirements
of greenhouse or vertical farming.

A combine harvester _moves over dirt_. That combine is also probably serving a
number of farmers, rather than just a single operation -- occasionally-used
high-capital equipment is ideal for lease or service arrangements rather than
ownership.

I completely agree that farming is vastly more capitalised than it was 100
years ago. _But it 's still far less capital intensive than most industrial
sectors._ Which means that any _additional_ capital requirements, such as
batteries and generators, hit hard at the bottom line and margins (if those
even exist in the first place).

