Smart Floating Farms
“We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about — farming replacing hunting.”
Jacques Yves Cousteau, Oceanographer
As already said in previous articles , one of the most important challenge of our time is “food supply”. The world is less than 40 years away from a serious problem: producing enough food for 9 billion mouths.
However, as 80% of the world’s sustainable land for raising crops is already in use, new solutions have to be found. Indeed, the needed improvement of food’s production will not be reached trough the usage of the 20% of land still unused.
The possible ways seems to be two:
- A huge improvement of the profitability of the used land trough new technology and management
- The development of “new lands” .
Some companies and cities (see this article) are moving into the first direction, trying to integrate agriculture and urban areas trough vertical crops and other interesting and potentially effective projects.
Other firm, like Forward Thinking Architecture, are moving into other directions, changing the idea of how we conceive both farms and water. The idea at the root of this new way of thinking is called floating farm and it is a real and already build-able structure.
The floating farm is an offshore structure which would be build of coast of a city in order to produce both fish and vegetal food throughout a simple system of connections between different operative layers.
The composition of the structure is inspired by the traditional Asian fish floating farms but on top of that it has two more levels, one for growing any kind of plant and another one to supply the needed energy throughout the conversion of solar energy.
The production of food it is divided on the first 2 levels and the last level is meant just for the energy supply.
Each of the 3 levels has a specific and accurate goal:
LEVEL 1: It is fully-closed to the outdoors and it is comprised primarily of fish farming operations. The level is Grid-based : a series of cages are placed between main pathways and are further split into smaller units. The idea is to divide the space in more and different environment in order to maintain a steady flow of fish all the year-round. Indeed, the fish groups are allowed to grow to maturity in certain are and then moved into a different one to be prepared for slaughter. Furthermore, on this level are managed all the connections with the mainland and the sea environment: wave barriers are placed all around in order to protect the structure from a possible rough sea, storage and packaging/shipping areas are placed close to boat docking points in order to allow the exchange of goods between the farm and the mainland. Then, last but not least, desalination plants are located at this level in order to supply the upper levels with the needed clean water.
LEVEL 2: This level is comprised of the “vegetal” production. This is a floor of automated hydroponics that utilizes nutrient-laden water rather than soil to nourish plants. The growth trough hydroponics requires no natural precipitation or fertile land and can be very effective using only treated water produced by the on-board desalination plant. Furthermore, a monitored re-use of H2O prevents eutrophication ( an excessive plant growth due to an overabundant access to nutrients) and eradicates agricultural run-off. These precautions are meant to limit human interaction with the farm as much as possible in order to make the whole structure as independent as possible.
LEVEL 3: This level is comprised of the energy supply. The whole roof top is plastered with solar panels in order to satisfy the energy requirements of the various fans, misters, microclimate controls and irrigation tools of the “farm”.
Finally, this “farm” can easily become an automated Farm Clusters run by the use of IT technologies/software.
Indeed, all those processes could be managed pretty much automatically or with a really small human intervention. Placing sensors everywhere in the structure and relying on the gadgetry of the “Internet of Things” to report data would make possible to run the entire structure on remote and without any physical presence required.
Furthermore, trough the application of the modern big data management’s tools it would be possible to determine what the local populace need most from the floating farms.
Thanks to these and many more detailed and integrated elements, the ‘FF’ (floating farm) is able to produce 365 days a year and independently from many events happening on the main land. Indeed, without the threat of losing crops to droughts, floods, pests, or increasingly frequent super-storms, the farm could produce all year long.
However, what is the coast of a such articulated structure? Preliminary cost-benefit and feasibility studies have predicted that the initial investment for the construction of a ‘FF’ will be paid back in a few years! Indeed, a regular floating farm would yield 8.1 tons of vegetables and 1.7 tons of fish per year, which would let the farm pay for itself within just 10 years.
On addition to the possible economical advantages, any community that would choose to invest in a Floating Farm would also benefit of an improvements of its environment’s quality. The Floating Farm will indeed drastically reduces fossil-based emissions by not using farm equipments like tractors or plows, and by minimizing the good’s shipping to a single morning and evening passage that simultaneously transports workers.
It is undoubted that in terms of the future of humanity and life’s improvement, drastic steps need to be taken to close the distance between produced quantity of food and needed quantity of food, between production’s location and consumption’s location. The floating farms seems to address and maybe solve both of these 2 problems. Indeed, as this structure can be located close to any areas that has access to water and as the production is not linked to anything that relies on the use of solid ground, it would be possible to bring the food close to where is needed using just a reduced amount of space.
In a world such the today one, where space start to be a precious resource having the change to use sea space to produce food may be the only chance we have to achieve the growth that we need in the food’s production.
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