Solar Greenhouses: Saviour of modern agriculture

Global climate change is a rising issue amongst the world at the moment and every living thing on this planet is affected. For human beings, this impact is much greater than simply affecting our personal, it affects the society, affects the economy, and one thing that relates to our basic survival – it affects agriculture.

The traditional method of open-field farming was an excellent method of farming up until the point global climate change started to affect agriculture. With unstable weather patterns exposed to the farms, crop yields are greatly affected by the event, and therefore taking an enormous hit onto the lives of farmers. Economic damages to their lives and basically affecting their way of surviving in this world. More and more farmers are now searching for an energy- and cost-efficient model that can help save their own business.

Of course, many farmers consider using greenhouses as a method of sustainable agriculture, however this is no longer the case. Traditional greenhouses may use the glass as walls to collect heat from the outside and storing them inside to keep the greenhouse at a relatively warm temperature. Global climate change presenting the unstable weather patterns will affect this setup. First of all, with frequent-changing temperatures, the greenhouses cannot store heat efficiently because of fluctuating temperatures on a near-daily basis. Second of all, traditional greenhouses aren’t excellent heat-storing devices.

The saviour of agriculture in this time would be known as solar greenhouses. Ever since the concept of “global warming” was introduced to mankind, most people turned towards solar energy to be more energy-efficient, and it is quite useful. Introducing the concept of solar energy to agriculture can greatly help the farmers.

Of course, there are different types of solar greenhouses: Passive or active. Passive solar greenhouses (the two greenhouses on the left of the diagram above) are ones that uses the building itself as the heat-storing device, therefore it is a very cost-efficient method of agriculture for it is cheaper. The active solar greenhouses (on the right of the diagram) are the ones who depends on an external device to store heat. This way it is much more expensive, but the farmer can control the heat much better than any other types of greenhouses. Most of the food that we are all eating today are known as high-value crops, meaning they are crops with high demand on them, for example, strawberries or potatoes. These high-value crops are usually grown in active solar greenhouses because they can be better grown inside a greenhouse where the temperature is much more controlled and can be kept at an optimum level.

Greenhouse Canada wrote an article regarding the effectiveness of solar greenhouses: “The Solar Solution”

Since active solar greenhouses can produce high-value crops at a high quality, the demand for these crops will eventually increase, with more output, the farmers are bound to increase their profit.

It sounds very easy I know, but if everything was this easy then we wouldn’t have any problems within the world. A book stated that “there is relatively little evidence that farmers have responded to recent changes in climate by changing their farming practice, or that they have much knowledge of potential future climate change.” The problem is that farmers are not aware of the situation, also that they are not willing to sacrifice a large amount of money for solar greenhouses in order to save their business. To most farmers, that process is just wasting money, but what they don’t understand is that active solar greenhouses is a long-term profit-making method of agriculture.

Of course, this is only one fraction of what agriculture really is, there are several other issues, for example, food security, health issues, and food mileage, etc. “The food… is it organic?” A question that pops up a lot recently, people consider organic foods “safer” foods compared to conventional ones, which is true. But what most people don’t understand is that organic foods are brought to you by plane from other countries in which the environment was polluted on the way:

With that question asked within the comic above, it makes people wonder… what is right?