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This story appears in the September 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.

In a potato field near the Netherlands' border with Belgium, Dutch farmer Jacob van den Borne is seated in the cabin of an immense harvester before an instrument panel worthy of the starship Enterprise.

From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he's monitoring two drones-a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air-that provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne's production numbers testify to the power of this "precision farming," as it's known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne's fields reliably produce more than 20.

That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry "Twice as much food using half as many resources." Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent. They've almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.

One more reason to marvel: The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country, with more than 1,300 inhabitants per square mile. It's bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it's the globe's number two exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270 times its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it?

Seen from the air, the Netherlands resembles no other major food producer-a fragmented patchwork of intensely cultivated fields, most of them tiny by agribusiness standards, punctuated by bustling cities and suburbs. In the country's principal farming regions, there's almost no potato patch, no greenhouse, no hog barn that's out of sight of skyscrapers, manufacturing plants, or urban sprawl. More than half the nation's land area is used for agriculture and horticulture.

Banks of what appear to be gargantuan mirrors stretch across the countryside, glinting when the sun shines and glowing with eerie interior light when night falls. They are Holland's extraordinary greenhouse complexes, some of them covering 175 acres.

These climate-controlled farms enable a country located a scant thousand miles from the Arctic Circle to be a global leader in exports of a fair-weather fruit: the tomato. The Dutch are also the world's top exporter of potatoes and onions and the second largest exporter of vegetables overall in terms of value. More than a third of all global trade in vegetable seeds originates in the Netherlands.

The brain trust behind these astounding numbers is centered at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), located 50 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Widely regarded as the world's top agricultural research institution, WUR is the nodal point of Food Valley, an expansive cluster of agricultural technology start-ups and experimental farms. The name is a deliberate allusion to California's Silicon Valley, with Wageningen emulating the role of Stanford University in its celebrated merger of academia and entrepreneurship.

Ernst van den Ende, managing director of WUR's Plant Sciences Group, embodies Food Valley's blended approach. A renowned scholar with the casual manner of a barista at a hip café, van den Ende is a world authority on plant pathology. But, he says, "I'm not simply a college dean. Half of me runs Plant Sciences, but the other half oversees nine separate business units involved in commercial contract research." Only that mix, "the science-driven in tandem with the market-driven," he maintains, "can meet the challenge that lies ahead."

The challenge? Put in bluntly apocalyptic terms, he says, the planet must produce "more food in the next four decades than all farmers in history have harvested over the past 8,000 years."

That's because by 2050, the Earth will be home to as many as 10 billion people, up from today's 7.5 billion. If massive increases in agricultural yield are not achieved, matched by massive decreases in the use of water and fossil fuels, a billion or more people may face starvation. Hunger could be the 21st century's most urgent problem, and the visionaries working in Food Valley believe they have found innovative solutions. The wherewithal to stave off catastrophic famine is within reach, van den Ende insists. His optimism rests on feedback from more than a thousand WUR projects in more than 140 countries and on its formal pacts with governments and universities on six continents to share advances and implement them.

A conversation with van den Ende is a white-knuckle ride on a torrent of brainstorms, statistics, and predictions. African drought? "Water isn't the fundamental problem. It's poor soil," he says. "The absence of nutrients can be offset by cultivating plants that act in symbiosis with certain bacteria to produce their own fertilizer." The soaring cost of grain to feed animals? "Feed them grasshoppers instead," he says. One hectare of land yields one metric ton of soy protein, a common livestock feed, a year. The same amount of land can produce 150 tons of insect protein.

The conversation rushes on to the use of LED lighting to permit 24-hour cultivation in precisely climate-controlled greenhouses. It then detours to a misconception that sustainable agriculture means minimal human intervention in nature.

"Look at the island of Bali!" he exclaims. For at least a thousand years, its farmers have raised ducks and fish within the same flooded paddies where rice is cultivated. It's an entirely self-contained food system, irrigated by intricate canal systems along mountain terraces sculpted by human hands.

"There's your model of sustainability," van den Ende says.

At every turn in the Netherlands, the future of sustainable agriculture is taking shape-not in the boardrooms of big corporations but on thousands of modest family farms. You see it vividly in the terrestrial paradise of Ted Duijvestijn and his brothers Peter, Ronald, and Remco. Like the Balinese, the Duijvestijns have constructed a self-contained food system in which a near-perfect balance prevails between human ingenuity and nature's potential.

At the Duijvestijns' 36-acre greenhouse complex near the old city of Delft, visitors stroll among ranks of deep green tomato vines, 20 feet tall. Rooted not in soil but in fibers spun from basalt and chalk, the plants are heavy with tomatoes-15 varieties in all-to suit the taste of the most demanding palate. In 2015 an international jury of horticultural experts named the Duijvestijns the world's most innovative tomato growers.

Since relocating and restructuring their 70-year-old farm in 2004, the Duijvestijns have declared resource independence on every front. The farm produces almost all of its own energy and fertilizer and even some of the packaging materials necessary for the crop's distribution and sale. The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands.

The only irrigation source is rainwater, says Ted, who manages the cultivation program. Each kilogram of tomatoes from his fiber-rooted plants requires less than four gallons of water, compared with 16 gallons for plants in open fields. Once each year the entire crop is regrown from seeds, and the old vines are processed to make packaging crates. The few pests that manage to enter the Duijvestijn greenhouses are greeted by a ravenous army of defenders such as the fierce Phytoseiulus persimilis, a predatory mite that shows no interest in tomatoes but gorges itself on hundreds of destructive spider mites.

A few days before I visited the Duijvestijns' operation, Ted had attended a meeting of farmers and researchers at Wageningen. "This is how we come up with innovative ways to move ahead, to keep improving," he told me. "People from all over Holland get together to discuss different perspectives and common goals. No one knows all the answers on their own."

The search for answers to a life-or-death question gave rise to one of the Netherlands' most innovative companies. Half a century ago, Jan Koppert was growing cucumbers on his land and using toxic chemical sprays to fend off pests. When a physician declared him allergic to pesticides, Koppert set out to learn all he could about the natural enemies of insects and arachnids.

Today Koppert Biological Systems is the global pacesetter in biological pest and disease control, with 1,330 employees and 26 international subsidiaries marketing its products in 96 countries. Koppert's firm can provide you with cotton bags of ladybug larvae that mature into voracious consumers of aphids. Or how about a bottle containing 2,000 of those predatory mites that hunt down spider mites on plants and suck them dry? Or a box of 500 million nematodes that mount deadly assaults on fly larvae that prey on commercial mushrooms?

Koppert's legions make love as well as war, in the guise of enthusiastic bumblebees. No form of artificial pollination matches the efficiency of bees buzzing from flower to flower, gathering nectar to nourish their queen and helping to fertilize the ovaries of plants along the way. Each Koppert hive accounts for daily visits to half a million flowers. Farmers using the bees typically report 20 to 30 percent increases in yields and fruit weight, for less than half the cost of artificial pollination.

Nowhere is the Netherlands' agricultural technology more cutting-edge than in the embryonic organism in which most food is literally rooted: seeds. And nowhere are the controversies that surround the future of agriculture more heated. Chief among them is the development of genetically modified organisms to produce larger and more pest-resistant crops. To their critics, GMOs conjure up a Frankenstein scenario, fraught with uncertainty about the consequences of radical experimentation with living entities.

Dutch firms are among the world leaders in the seed business, with close to $1.7 billion worth of exports in 2016. Yet they market no GMO products. A new seed variety in Europe's heavily regulated GMO arena can cost a hundred million dollars and require 12 to 14 years of research and development, according to KeyGene's Arjen van Tunen. By contrast, the latest achievements in the venerable science of molecular breeding-which introduces no foreign genes-can deliver remarkable gains in five to 10 years, with development costs as low as $100,000 and seldom more than a million dollars. It is a direct descendant of methods employed by farmers in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago.

The sales catalog of Rijk Zwaan, another Dutch breeder, offers high-yield seeds in more than 25 broad groups of vegetables, many that defend themselves naturally against major pests. Heleen Bos is responsible for the company's organic accounts and international development projects. She might be expected to dwell on the fact that a single high-tech Rijk Zwaan greenhouse tomato seed, priced below $0.50, has been known to produce a mind-boggling 150 pounds of tomatoes. Instead she talks about the hundreds of millions of people, most of them women and children, who lack sufficient food.

Like many of the entrepreneurs at Food Valley firms, Bos has worked in the fields and cities of the world's poorest nations. With lengthy postings to Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Bangladesh over the past 30 years, she knows that hunger and devastating famine are not abstract threats.

"Of course, we can't immediately implement the kind of ultrahigh-tech agriculture over there that you see in the Netherlands," she says. "But we are well into introducing medium-tech solutions that can make a huge difference." She cites the proliferation of relatively inexpensive plastic greenhouses that have tripled some crop yields compared with those of open fields, where crops are more subject to pests and drought.

Since 2008 Rijk Zwaan has supported a breeding program in Tanzania at a 50-acre trial field in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its seeds are sent to Holland for quality control tests on germination rates, purity, and resistance to pests and diseases. Collaborative projects are under way in Kenya, Peru, and Guatemala. "We try to develop seeds for their specific conditions," Bos says. But the starting point, she adds emphatically, cannot be the sort of top-down approach that has doomed many well-meaning foreign aid projects.

"We have constant, tremendously important conversations with the small growers themselves-on their needs, on the weather and soil conditions they face, on costs," she says.

For some Dutch researchers, concern for people threatened by hunger stems in part from a national trauma: The Netherlands was the last Western country to suffer a serious famine, when 10,000 to 20,000 people died in German-occupied lands during the final year of World War II. Decades later, WUR's Rudy Rabbinge, professor emeritus of sustainable development and food security, took up the cause when he helped devise extensive changes in the faculty, student body, and curriculum that transformed the institution into what he calls "a university for the world, and not simply for the Dutch." Today a hefty share of the academic and research activities at WUR are focused on problems facing poor nations.

Some 45 percent of its graduate students-including nearly two-thirds of all Ph.D. candidates-are recruited abroad, representing more than a hundred nations. Asians, led by Chinese and Indonesians, outnumber almost all non-Dutch Europeans combined. WUR alumni are found in the highest echelons of agricultural ministries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

In a campus cafeteria, I sit down with three of WUR's most promising students, a description that, not long ago, would have meant male and Dutch born. All three are young women, hailing from Uganda, Nepal, and Indonesia.

"I met a Wageningen alumna when I was an undergrad in Uganda," Leah Nandudu tells me when I ask how she wound up here. "She was an expert on phenotyping," the advanced studies that paint a detailed portrait of a plant's traits and potential. "It inspired me to discover that an African could do these things. She was the future; she was where we need to go."

The meeting eventually led Nandudu to a WUR scholarship. Her father farms three acres, split between coffee and bananas. Her mother teaches English in a primary school and helps in the field. "We have all the problems farmers face everywhere today, only much worse, especially due to the consequences of climate change."

Pragya Shrestha was raised in the Nepali countryside, some parts of which have been wracked by years of reliance on pesticides and fertilizers. Sounder, sustainable methods have made few inroads so far.

"It's a political problem," she says. New cultivation methods can't be implemented because of a shortage of public funding. "It's also a population problem, the fragmentation of the land into smaller and smaller parcels, suitable only for the use of inefficient human labor and generating very little income."

Renna Eliana Warjoto is from Bandung, the third largest city in Indonesia. "People are mistrustful of ideas that come from abroad," she says, as Shrestha and Nandudu nod in agreement. "Farmers are so used to having marginal lives and incomes," she adds, "that they have a hard time believing things could be different."

In 1944-45 a lethal famine struck the island of Java, where Bandung is located, killing some 2.4 million people. Devastating regional crop failures have haunted Indonesia as recently as 2005. Food supplies periodically run out in rural Nepal because of drought and high prices on essential imports. In 2011 a famine in the Horn of Africa affected 13 million people, and in 2017 1.6 million Ugandans face starvation without rapid assistance from abroad. All these events were unimaginable at the time, yet they pale in comparison to what could lie ahead. The number of people menaced by famine in just three African nations and across the Red Sea in Yemen exceeds 20 million today and is rising inexorably, according to the United Nations. "We are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the UN," the organization's emergency relief coordinator, Stephen O'Brien, warned in March.

"Our most difficult task is changing the perceptions of our own people-about the crisis we confront and what we must do to address it," Nandudu says. "That's my job when I go home. We cannot turn our faces away from reality."

Some 4,000 miles south of Wageningen, in a family-owned bean field in Africa's Eastern Rift Valley, a team from SoilCares, a Dutch agricultural technology firm, explains the functions of a small handheld device. In conjunction with a cell phone app, the device analyzes the soil's pH, organic matter, and other properties, then uploads the results to a database in the Netherlands and returns a detailed report on optimal fertilizer use and nutrient needs-all in less than 10 minutes. At a cost of a few dollars, the report provides input that can help reduce crop losses by enormous margins to farmers who have never had access to soil sampling of any kind.

Less than 5 percent of the world's estimated 570 million farms have access to a soil lab. That's the kind of number the Dutch see as a challenge.

"What does our work mean for developing countries? That question is always raised here," says Martin Scholten, who directs WUR's Animal Sciences Group. "It's part of every conversation."

Frank Viviano, a foreign correspondent based in Italy, has covered stories in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Luca Locatelli specializes in photographing interactions between people and technology.

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The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.

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er zit een slotje op de site dus zou wel betrouwbaar zijn verder staan hier allemaal dingen in om warmte vast te houden

leon

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If you feel a shiver each time you open your utility bill, your house may be too cold. More likely, however, you're paying more than you should to heat it. In either case, you can make changes now that will give you a warm home and save you money.

These aren't big projects like adding attic insulation or replacing your windows-save those for later. They're easy-to-do and inexpensive techniques. The most complicated will take a weekend afternoon, and many take little time and don't even require the purchase of materials, only changing a habit or two. Others can be done for as little as $10. We'll take a look first at the obvious stuff and then at more specialized - but still simple - energy-saving techniques.

13 Ways To Make Your House Warmer

1. Install a Programmable Thermostat

A programmable thermostat allows you to preset temperatures for different times of the day because you don't need to keep your home at 68 degrees around the clock. Although one shouldn't be used with heat pumps, a programmable thermostat is a real money-saver with air-conditioning as well as with heat. Choose a setting on the low end when you're sleeping or are away and go with a higher setting at other times (see table bellow) for savings of between 10 and 20 percent of your bill. Some units can store up to four temperature settings each day - e.g., morning, day, evening, night. All have a manual override switch.

You can generally install a new thermostat yourself. Always follow manufacturer's instructions, but typically you remove the old thermostat and unscrew the wire leads attached to the terminals on the back. Reattach those wires to the new thermostat's terminals, after inserting mounting screws in the wall, if necessary. (If you have separate heating and A/C units that use the same thermostat, you may find four leads, two for each unit.)
For Heat

6 a.m. to 9 a.m. = 68 degrees

9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. = 60 degrees

5:30 to 11 p.m. = 68 degrees

11 p.m. to 6 a.m. = 60 degrees

For Air Conditioning

6 a.m. to 9 a.m. = 75 degrees

9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. = 80 degrees

5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. = 75 degrees

11 p.m. to 6 a.m. = 80 degrees

2. It's Closed-Flue Season, so Minimize Those Romantic Fires

An open fireplace damper lets the same amount of heated air escape up the chimney as a wide-open 48-inch window lets out. Make sure your flu is closed when you don't have a fire going. In fact, it is a good idea to reduce the number of times you use your fireplace.

A roaring fire exhausts over 20,000 cubic feet of heated air per hour to the outside. Sure it feels warm by the fire, but every Btu that goes up the chimney is replaced by cold air pulled into the house elsewhere. And all that cold air has to be heated, a costly prospect.

Cost: $0

Can't resist a fire every few nights? Install a set of glass fireplace doors ($400 to $600). Closing these doors when you go to bed prevents large volumes of heated air in the living space from escaping after the fire has gone out.

3. The Spin on Ceiling Fans

Ceiling fans are everywhere in warm-weather climates. Spinning counterclockwise, they move air around the room. Not all energy experts feel it's a good idea to use them in the heating season (doubters says they cool the air too much), but the fans do help bring heated air down to earth in rooms with cathedral or high-sloped ceilings.

However, that's only if you slide the reversing switch on the side of the motor housing to the winter (clockwise) position. Then run the fan at its lowest speed. If you can't reverse the blade rotation or if you think the fan is cooling off the room too much, leave it off.

Cost: $0

4. Move Furniture Away From Vents, Registers, and Radiators

This sounds like a no-brainer, but many times a couch, chair, or bed moved during the summer stays there in winter, blocking the flow of heat into the room. This wastes money and leads to cold rooms. With a forced-air system, blocking a supply or return vent can cause a house-wide pressure imbalance that disrupts the heat flow in the whole system.

Cost: $0

5. Stop the Draft, Close the Door

Light a match and the rising hot air will draw nearby cooler air into the match flame. Heat a building, and the rising hot air will pull cold air from outside into the house. It's a physical principle called "stack effect." To defeat it, cut down on spaces cold air can enter your house, like under a door to the outside.

Seal this gap with a "door snake," a long thin cloth sack, like a bean bag. Fill it with dried peas or rice, something to make it heavy enough to stay in place. You can sew one using scrap fabrics. You can also keep the heat where it's needed by making sure some interior doors, such as those leading to hallways or near stairways, are kept shut. This closes off natural air passageways so they can't act as chimneys, allowing warm air to escape up through the house.

Cost: Under $5

6. Install a Door Sweep

If you feel cold air seeping beneath a door leading outside and find that using a door snake is inconvenient (see item #6), install a draft-defeating nylon door sweep. This long, thin broom like vinyl-and-pile attachment gets installed along the inside bottom edge of the door. Cut the sweep to fit with a hacksaw and keep it in place with four or five wood screws.

If you heat the garage, check to see if cold air is infiltrating along the bottom edge of the door. Rubber garage-door gaskets, nailed in place with 1 in. galvanized roofing nails, can stop that cold air cold.

Cost: $8 each for a door-bottom sweep and a garage-door gasket

7. Quick-Seal Windows

Dead air is a very effective insulator, and you can create a pocket of it by installing clear plastic film across the inside of your windows. Available in kits that contain plastic film and double-sided tape, the plastic becomes nearly invisible when you heat it with a blow-dryer. If you find it unsightly, place the film on windows and patio doors selectively or only in unused rooms.

Measure your window before buying; kits vary in size, and they work only with wood, aluminum and vinyl-clad molding. Payback is fast on this inexpensive technique, because heat lost through windows accounts for 10 to 25 percent of your overall heating bill.

If you can rattle your windows, they're letting a lot of heat escape around the frames. Seal the open spaces with puttylike rope caulk before shrink wrapping. Press-in-place rope caulk ($5 per window) is mess-free and easy to use, and removing it in the spring is a cinch. But be sure to do a thorough window-sealing and caulking job before next heating season rolls around.

Cost: $4 to $6 per window, $15 for a patio door

8. Work the Drapes

Got drapes or curtains that block sunlight? Open them during the day to get free solar heat (make sure windows are clean). And then close the curtains just before sunset. Also, consider insulating curtains (around $100 per window).

As a general rule, each square foot of window that you insulate at night saves about 1 gal. of oil or nearly 1.5 cubic feet of gas a year, which means that insulating curtains pay for themselves in around seven years, to say nothing of the added comfort.

Cost: $0

9. Change Your Furnace Filter

If you have a forced-air system, changing the furnace filter can save you some energy (up to 5 percent) and keep dust down in the house. The system will last longer and be less likely to break down. The most popular 16 X 20-inch duct filter costs around 50 cents when bought by the box. Change them monthly during heating season. Measure your air filter before shopping; they range in size from 12 X 12 inches to 30 X 30 inches. An alternative to swapping out the replacement filter is to use washable filters (around $20 each). With care, they can last five years.

Cost: Under $15 per year

10. Adjust Your Water Heater

You use more hot water in winter. Lower the water heater temperature from 140 degrees to 120 degrees. And take showers, not baths. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average bath consumes up to 25 gallons of hot water, while a five-minute shower uses up much less - only around 10 gallons.

Equipping your showers with low-flow shower heads also dramatically reduces the consumption of water, both hot and cold.

Cost: $0

11. Defeat Rapid Cycling

Rapid cycling - when a heating system fires on and off - wastes money. It occurs because of a heat-anticipation feature on thermostats that maintains a near-constant room temperature. Most electronic setback thermostats are programmed to act when they sense a 1 degree to 1.5 degree drop. If the thermostat is is programmed to less than 1 degree, the heater may go into rapid cycle, firing every three minutes or less to maintain temperature.

To stop rapid cycling, make sure the "cycle-rate adjustment" in the thermostat setup mode reads from 1 degree to 1.5 degree. If you change it, move it higher. On most mechanical thermostats, the amperage scale is set from 0.1 to 1.2 amps. To defeat rapid cycling, set the arrow one notch higher. Let it cycle for 24 hours before adjusting it again. Rapid cycling is common in the relatively warm early and late winter, when you're using a unit capable of heating on the coldest days. Detect rapid cycling in midwinter, when the heater should fire 5 minutes on, 5 minutes off.

Cost: $0

12. Lower the Thermostat

Each degree you lower the thermostat on your heating system decreases your fuel bill by 3 percent. Going from 72 degrees down to 68 degrees doesn't matter much in terms of comfort, but it can save up to 12 percent on your heating bill. (All temperatures in this article are in degrees Fahrenheit.)

If you're using a coil-type thermostat, you'll get more accurate readings if you clean it. Pop off the thermostat cover and blow or gently swipe away the dust.

13. Get Free Energy-Saving Info

Need more guidance on saving energy? The U.S. Department of Energy's website provides tons of easy and practical energy-saving tips for your home.
Looking for more help with repairs around your home? A home warranty may help. Check out the This Old Houses Reviews Team's in-depth reviews on:

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13 Inexpensive Ways to Keep Your House Warm

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If you feel a shiver each time you open your utility bill, your house may be too cold. More likely, however, you're paying more than you should to heat it. In either case, you can make changes now that will give you a warm home and save you money.

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amber en vera
is goede site

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Constellation Residential and Small Business Blog

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When you create a sustainable home, you are improving the environment and lowering the cost of running your home. Saving energy, water and maintenance on systems and appliances contribute to making a home sustainable. When you have a sustainable house, you create a healthier environment for yourself, family and pets, your community and your bank account.

What is a sustainable home?

A sustainable home is one that is built or retrofitted in a way that conserves resources, optimizes energy and water use and that will last longer with quality systems.

A sustainable house is built with low-impact, high-performance materials.They are efficient in terms of manufacturing, shipping and installing. Plus, because high-quality materials and systems break less and last longer, they produce less waste.

Energy efficiency is the key to home sustainability across the life of the structure. This article will take a deeper look at what makes a house sustainable, how to retrofit a conventional house and how to build a sustainable house when undertaking new construction. Plus we will share some sustainable home ideas that will help you think through how to make your home more sustainable.

What makes a house environmentally sustainable?

To make your house sustainable, consider every detail:

Building materials and methods

Decorating choices

Insulation

Windows

Heat, ventilation and air conditioning

Lighting

Appliances

Plumbing fixtures

Use of smart systems

Energy generation from solar and wind

Your habits when it comes to regular maintenance, conservation and green cleaning

Construction tips for building a sustainable house

These tips on how to build a sustainable house will guide you in reducing waste, increasing durable reliability and improving energy and water efficiency over the lifespan of the home. Building in sustainable house features from the start will pay off in the long run.

1. Consider passive solar design.

Passive solar design captures energy from the sun to help heat and cool your living spaces. Using no mechanical or electric equipment, passive solar design relies on building materials that reflect, absorb or transmit the sun's radiation. Inside spaces are designed to facilitate the movement of sun-heated air without the use of fans. A passive house requires less energy to heat and cool.

2. Install high-performance windows.

High-performance windows can cut energy usage, as windows account for 50% or more of lost energy. New technologies include double glazing, special coatings, nonconductive framing materials and higher-quality, air-tight construction.

Replacing windows makes your home more energy-efficient, protects your belongings from fading, and makes rooms quieter.

For a warmer climate: Look for what is called low solar gain, meaning less heat is conducted into your interior through the windows. Reflective technologies are very helpful, as is double glazing. Windows that also facilitate ventilation are ideal.

For a colder climate: Choose frames that are well insulated and have the right U-value, which is the measure of the rate of heat flow through a material. Lower is better. Triple-glazed windows with a vacuum between panes can further minimize heat loss. Look for a tight fit to eliminate drafts.

After your HVAC systems, appliances are the next biggest energy consumers in your home. Think of them as having two prices: the cost of buying and the cost of operating. When you buy the most energy-efficient options, you dramatically cut the cost of using them, which can easily exceed the cost of buying them.

Use our home sustainability appliance guide and these appliance-specific tips to make energy-efficient choices:

4. Install a drip irrigation system.

What grows outside your house increases home sustainability. Landscaping choices can keep your home cooler, serve as a windbreak and contribute to cleaner air. Make choices that need less water and upkeep. Mowing lawns eats energy. If you are in an area where watering your landscape is necessary, drip irrigation is a sustainable home alternative. Drip irrigation systems use gravity to deliver water to plants, focusing it directly on the roots where it's needed. You not only save electricity by eliminating water pumps but also minimize water wasted through evaporation.

5. Use eco-paints.

Use eco-paints in your sustainable house that emit fewer toxins. They reduce indoor air pollution and are less toxic to manufacture.

A cool roof reflects the sun's heat instead of absorbing it into your home. The effect on your cooling bill can be tremendous.

Renewable energy is generated from naturally replenishing resources like the sun, wind, and water. Energy providers like Constellation are at the forefront of offering customers renewable options that provide you with the power you need in a way that is better for the environment.

8. Talk to sustainability experts.

Sustainability is an area of fast innovation in home building, home systems, appliances and lighting. Sustainability experts can perform an energy audit to give you advice on easy fixes and the latest technology.

9. Recycle and reuse any construction waste.

Don't just get a dumpster and send your waste to a landfill. Save some materials for your own reuse. You can sell bricks, wood and metal, even old appliances that have a scrap value.

Simple home changes to support your sustainability goals

Making small improvements to increase sustainability at home can have a big impact. Many are relatively easy to fit into your budget, too.

10. Draft-proof your doors and windows.

Replace leaky weatherstripping and use foam tape to cover cracks. Eliminating gaps around the house that leak heat and cool air improves efficiency.

11. Invest in curtains or blinds.

Window treatments can block the sun and reflect back solar energy that heats up your house in the summer. In the winter, they can reduce drafts.

12. Reevaluate your home's insulation.

A professional can give you advice on easy improvements, like foam injection, blown-in attic insulation and other options for insulating walls, floors and ceilings to create a more sustainable house.

13. Install solar panels.

Solar panels generate electricity you can use to power your home. By choosing energy sources like solar, you have a clean energy source that emits less carbon emissions than fossil fuels.

14. Clean your refrigerator's coils.

Maintenance makes your refrigerator more efficient. It will draw less power and perform better if you keep the coils on the back free of dust and grime.

15. Install a water filter that removes microplastics.

Adding a filter to your washing machine will ensure that you aren't adding microplastics to the environment. You can also filter your tap water coming into your home to keep microplastics out of your drinking water.

16. Replace fluorescent light bulbs with LED or CFL bulbs.

Offering longer life, greater energy efficiency and fewer toxic metals, these new bulbs are worth the switch. They are an easy way to increase sustainability at home.

17. Switch to smart power strips.

Use these in place of regular power strips to save energy. They sense when your device is in active use and cut power when it's in standby. A smart home is a sustainable home.

18. Clean the filter on your clothes dryer.

A dirty filter is a fire hazard and a waste of energy. Clean it regularly for drier clothes and lower energy consumption.

Simple habits to support your sustainability goals

Upgrading your personal habits is just as effective in improving home sustainability as upgrading your appliances and systems.

19. Create a compost bin of kitchen scraps.

Composting keeps waste out of landfills and creates a nutrient-rich additive for your garden.

20. Plant an energy-efficient garden.

An energy-efficient garden minimizes water use. Choose hardy plants that don't need frequent watering and use plenty of mulch. Collect rain water to use for drip irrigation.

21. Use cold water when washing your clothes.

High-efficiency washers and modern detergents get your clothes clean without using hot water. Your clothes will look newer longer if you avoid the fading and wear that hot water causes.

22. Buy recycled products.

Buying products made with recycled materials is good for the environment and creates more demand that encourages more recycling, fueling the circular economy.

23. Use dryer balls.

Dryer balls keep your clothes separated as they tumble, increasing airflow and dryer efficiency.

24. Line-dry your clothes.

Drying your clothes on a line outside the old-fashioned way uses less energy. If you miss the softness from drying items in your dryer, remove them from the line when they are nearly dry. Finish with a few minutes of tumbling in your dryer.

25. Use natural cleaning products.

Natural cleaning products keep toxins out of the water supply, out of your indoor air and off your skin.

7 types of sustainable and eco-friendly homes to get inspired by

Sustainable living in eco-friendly housing is increasingly sought after. A sustainable home can be just as functional and convenient as a conventional home. You don't have to sacrifice style or comfort with today's sustainable home features.

What are the different types of sustainable homes?

A sustainable home that uses fewer resources to build and is eco-friendly to live in is desirable among smart home buyers-and renters. Energy-saving new home features are built into some homes. You can add others to existing structures to improve home sustainability. Here are some of the most common sustainable house options and types of sustainable homes.

1. Shipping container homes

Using shipping containers to create homes recycles the containers in a way that is structurally strong and extremely energy efficient. Building is fast and doesn't require a large number of added materials that need to be manufactured and shipped to your home site.

2. Zero-carbon homes

These homes are designed and built to use enough renewable energy that they offset the energy used to construct and run them. Their carbon footprint becomes zero over time. Using passive house technology and off-grid renewable energy plays a big part in making them sustainable.

3. Tiny homes

Downsizing to live in only the space you truly need creates a smaller, more efficient structure. You won't have to pay to heat and air condition a large amount of space and tiny homes use fewer materials in construction.

4. Prefabricated homes

Houses that are designed and manufactured elsewhere are more efficient to build. Only assembly happens onsite. You can have expertly designed structures that use premium materials at a much lower price.

5. Passive houses

Passive homes make careful use of the sun's energy to keep a house warm in the winter. They also use ventilation, materials and structural elements to keep the home cooler through the summer.

6. Straw bale homes

These structures are built of bricks of compressed straw that is sealed with a moisture barrier and finished with an attractive plaster outer layer. Because they're made with a renewable material and because their thick walls offer superior insulation, straw bale homes are highly energy efficient.

7. Earthship homes

A large variety of natural and recycled materials go into building this kind of structure. Recycled aluminum cans, plastic bottles, tires and even cardboard are used. They have a high thermal mass and thick walls, combining to be energy efficient.

Make your home sustainable while enjoying long-term energy savings

By learning how to make your home more sustainable or how to build a sustainable house, you can contribute to a healthier environment. Add in renewable energy options like those offered by Constellation, and you have a sustainable home that will pay you back in energy savings as well as comfort.

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25 Ways to Make Your Home Sustainable | Constellation

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Environmental sustainability starts in the home. There are simple ways to make your home more sustainable and save on energy costs.

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New Holland Agricultural Tractors T6 METHANE POWER Overview

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Find out more about New Holland Agricultural Tractors T6 METHANE POWER. Browse the gallery, check out the technical specifications and find a dealer

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The New Holland Agriculture Methane Powered Concept Tractor (Full Version)

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Het is zekerweten betrouwbaar, want het staat er zeker weten duidelijk in..

gemaakt door Niek Klein Tuente

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Saving fuel and money goes hand-in-hand. That's why smart drivers use various techniques to take advantage of that fact. Several techniques don't mean they're difficult to manage. Actually, these techniques and tips are easy incorporate in your daily motor rides. So, you don't need to worry about making significant changes to your usual routines. Even while you're still maximising fuel efficiency.

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How to save fuel: fuel consumption and saving tips | Barum

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Saving fuel and money goes hand-in-hand. That's why smart drivers use various techniques to take advantage of that fact. Several techniques don't mean they're difficult to manage. Actually, these techniques and tips are easy incorporate in your daily motor rides. So, you don't need to worry about making significant changes to your usual routines.

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Where to find Sustainable Aviation Fuel — 4AIR

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4AIR has created an interactive, up-to-date and verified listing of physical locations for sustainable aviation fuel, specifically for business and general aviation users.