Green Lightning produces measurable nitrate, but its claimed fertilizer replacement is vastly larger than the nitrogen it actually fixes.
Green Lightning really does make nitrogen fertilizer from air and electricity, but it makes very little of it compared with what its marketing says it can replace. Nitrogen is not merely something that encourages a plant to grow. Nitrogen atoms become part of the plant itself, incorporated into proteins, chlorophyll, … [continued]
US Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) is a longtime organic farmer. She’s also a member of the House Agriculture Committee who is calling on the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to stop hemming and hawing and, instead, get on the ball to implement recommendations from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report … [continued]
More than 300,000 plant-protection drones now perform roughly 203 million hectare-treatments annually in China. The market has moved beyond adoption into service, maintenance, renewal and operating standards.
Agricultural spray drones are no longer an emerging technology in China. They are ordinary farm machinery at extraordinary scale. China entered 2026 with about 309,000 plant-protection drones, and those aircraft performed roughly 203 million hectare-treatments during 2025. A hectare treated three times counts as three hectare-treatments, so that figure measures … [continued]
Farm electrification is several different operating problems sharing one electrical platform. Stationary loads, redesignable services and narrow-window seasonal work require different investment sequences.
Ask whether agriculture can electrify and the conversation usually arrives at the same machine within minutes: the tractor. More specifically, the large diesel tractor working hard through planting, harvest or another narrow seasonal window. It is a legitimate engineering challenge, but it is a poor organizing principle for farm electrification. … [continued]
Agrivoltaics works where panels provide useful farm functions such as shade, crop protection or water resilience, not merely where crops survive beside solar.
Agrivoltaics is appealing because it seems to solve two land-use problems at once. Put solar panels and farming on the same land, and the conflict between food and electricity appears to soften. The farm keeps producing, the panels produce power, and the project can be described as more sophisticated than … [continued]
Volunteer Judi Van Der Spoole at the First Church community garden. Photo by Carolyn Fortuna, CleanTechnica
He wears a straw floppy hat, gray tee shirt, black shorts, and topsiders. His round face and easy smile belie his tenacity and vision. Bernie McBee has led an incredible mission to create a sustainable community garden in an economically disadvantaged area of Fort Pierce, Florida. With the support of … [continued]
ChatGPT generated image of a pile of fossil generated sulfur essential for fertilizer with the Strait of Hormuz behind it
When people think about the Strait of Hormuz, they think about oil tankers, LNG carriers, naval escorts, insurance premiums, and the price of gasoline. They generally do not think about yellow piles of sulfur beside gas plants, phosphate fertilizer complexes, or the acid circuits that keep copper and nickel processing … [continued]
Florida has its share of problems, but our ability to purchase produce year round is remarkable. In my town we have an open-air produce market open seven days a week, and different selections of fresh vegetables and fruits inspire my creativity to design interesting meals. I was thinking about how … [continued]
People sometimes think that I go out intentionally looking for good news. I don’t, really. But sometimes I happen across it. And sometimes, it is just a matter of seeing things that can be hopeful when they are viewed together. I was thinking recently about the Great Green Wall of … [continued]
ChatGPT generated this image of fossil fuel infrastructure emitting visible pollution to illustrate the enduring and dominant role of fossil fuels in driving climate change
Fossil fuels are the dominant cause of global climate change. Decades of rigorous scientific research, repeated validation, and global scientific consensus confirm this unequivocally. This core truth needs reinforcement because a provocative paper recently published in Environmental Research attempts to upend this established understanding by claiming that agriculture, particularly livestock farming, … [continued]
