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Food and Farming

The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments

The printed archives of Low-tech Magazine now amount to four volumes with a total of 2,398 pages and 709 images.

Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities

In the mid 20th century, whole cities’ sewage systems safely and successfully used fish to treat and purify their water. Waste-fed fish ponds are a low-tech, cheap, and sustainable alternative to deal with our own shit – and to obtain high protein food in the process.

Vertical Farming Does not Save Space

If the electricity for a vertical farm is supplied by solar panels, the energy production takes up at least as much space as the vertical farm saves.

How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again

From the Neolithic to the beginning of the twentieth century, coppiced woodlands, pollarded trees, and hedgerows provided people with a sustainable supply of energy, materials, and food.

Fruit Trenches: Cultivating Subtropical Plants in Freezing Temperatures

During the first half of the twentieth century, Soviet citrologists grew (sub)tropical plants in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius – outdoors, and without the use of glass or any fossil fuel-powered assistance.

The Printed Website: Second Volume Out Now

The second volume features a third of the web articles published in the earlier years, carefully selected for their continued relevance and interest today.

The Messy World of Fermentation

When modernity meets its end-point and creates a world where everything is sterile, controlled, and known, there will be little space for fermentation.

Vietnam's Low-tech Food System Takes Advantage of Decay

Vietnam’s decentralised food system has low energy inputs and reduced food waste, giving us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like

Pigeon Towers: A Low-tech Alternative to Synthetic Fertilizers

Pigeon towers helped Persian farmers cultivate all kinds of crops on previously arid, thin-soil land.

Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s

From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

Reinventing the Greenhouse

Contrary to its fully glazed counterpart, a passive solar greenhouse is designed to retain as much warmth as possible.

Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce for the Ancient Roman Masses

Fish fermentation allowed the ancient Romans to store their fish surplus for long periods, in a time when there were no freezers and fishing was bound to fish migratory patterns.