Comment on crop candles
Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
A while ago, I saw a documentary where they had a big-ass fan on an apple orchard, which they would turn on early in the morning.
The problem is that when it cools down in the night, it can dip below freezing temperatures, which would damage the blossoms, if it stays that low for too long. And the cold air gets trapped between the apple trees, so just creating some artificial wind is apparently a pretty good solution to untrap it and therefore allow things to warm back up as soon as the sun hits.
Just found it interesting that this is a common enough problem, without requiring more drastic solutions like actual heating, so that they came up with this idea.
The documentary is in German, but you can see it at 5:00 here: ardmediathek.de/…/Y3JpZDovL3dkci5kZS9CZWl0cmFnLXN…
Some varieties of apples blooms are frost sensitive. Others can shrug off a frost and not really care. It’s a generic difference in the cultivars.
www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/…/html
So if you see a big ass fan in the orchard, it’s because the grower wanted to push a variety that is not well adapted to the local environment.
Scafir@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Turns out that this is common in Japan for tea fields. They mount big fans on poles all accross the field for it (you provably have to zoom in to see them)
Image
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I admit that when you said “big fan” I imagined a wind turbine in reverse.
Zooming into the picture, I see it’s more like desk fans on sticks. I’m sure they’re bigger than that really, but is it really too much to ask for a windmill that does work that way?
pirateKaiser@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
At this size I imagine you’d have to worry about the fan generating enough force to start tilting and falling without proper support