this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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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: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/Y3JpZDovL3dkci5kZS9CZWl0cmFnLXNvcGhvcmEtNzJhZTQ5NTctNDkxOS00YTRkLTk0ZTItMGU0YWQwYzFkODE1
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)
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?
At this size I imagine you'd have to worry about the fan generating enough force to start tilting and falling without proper support