Current:Home > MarketsCows in Rotterdam harbor, seedlings on rafts in India; are floating farms the future?-Angel Dreamer Wealth Society D1 Reviews & Insights
Cows in Rotterdam harbor, seedlings on rafts in India; are floating farms the future?
View Date:2024-12-23 23:21:56
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — On the top deck of a three-tiered structure moored near downtown Rotterdam, brown and white cows graze on hay dropped from a conveyor belt above their heads and rinds of oranges salvaged from supermarket juice machines in the port city. Canopies overhead protect the cows from sun and collect rainwater they will eventually drink.
Sometimes the Maas-Rijn-Ijssel cows — named for three Dutch rivers — walk over to a machine that automatically milks them, or they shuffle out of the way of a robot trundling past to mop up manure that will be turned into organic fertilizer.
“We call our cows upcycle ladies,” says Minke van Wingerden of the Floating Farm, which sells the milk, cheese and buttermilk produced by the cows in a small shop on dry land next to its harbor berth.
The Floating Farm, which has been operational since 2019 and bills itself as the world’s first such farm, isn’t on entirely new terrain. Efforts to put agriculture on or in the water are as old as the Aztecs, who built artificial islets to grow food long ago in what’s now Mexico.
But it’s an idea that is getting new attention as a way of tackling both food security and the challenges of climate change. And it doesn’t have to be as sophisticated as the Dutch farm, which came about after Van Wingerden’s husband, Peter, witnessed the food shortages that hit New York after Hurricane Sandy slammed the city in 2012.
In coastal and low-lying areas of India and Bangladesh, a non-government organization is reviving a traditional practice of creating floating rafts that can keep seedlings above monsoon flood waters that can drown crops.
Rotterdam opened the first floating farm in the world. Now, others are wondering if they can better utilize the water to bring agriculture products closer to the buyers. (Dec. 10) (AP video: Seir Ahmad Production: Brittany Peterson)
The South Asian Forum for Environment, based in Kolkata, has made some technological improvements for what it calls “climate-resilient float farming.” The bamboo rafts are built larger and heavier to better withstand storms. Plastic covering and shade nets protect fragile plants, and solar-powered pumps collect rainwater to irrigate the seedlings. And the organization has partnered with local research institutes to supply farmers with the best possible climate-resilient seeds, and to pass on knowledge about pest control. Communications director Amrita Chatterjee said that can become more urgent when pests proliferate in times of extreme heat, like this summer, where the temperature reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) in some locations.
Chatterjee said the rafts are “not a very conventional type of farming” and it takes patience to get used to them. But in a few years they’ve more than doubled, to 500, the number of floating farms operating in different villages. Vegetables like medicinal plants, spinach and chilies are among the items cultivated on the floating platforms, and farmers can also raise crabs to be fattened for market in floating boxes.
“Slowly, everyone is getting interested,” Chatterjee said.
With increasingly erratic monsoons, the rafts have helped with food security, Chatterjee said. They were also helpful when the Indian state of West Bengal was hit with a one-two punch of a cyclone followed by COVID-19 in 2020, she said.
Farmers using the rafts now are feeding themselves and selling a bit of surplus in local markets, Chatterjee said. Her group hopes that the idea can be scaled up to make it much more commercially viable.
Floating farms will clearly be scalable in the coming decades in Southeast Asia, but educating about the technology may be a hurdle to its adoption in some places, said Craig Jenkins, academy professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
Back in Rotterdam, the owners of the Floating Farm cite a number of reasons for putting farms on water. That includes urbanization putting more people in cities, making it sensible to bring food sources closer to them. They say the extreme weather spurred by climate change — heavy rainfall and flooding of cities and farmland — makes their approach climate-adaptive to feed those cities.
Jake Boswell, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Ohio State University, said the success of floating farms likely will vary by region. While much of the world’s population lives in coastal areas, only a subset of those communities also farm in flood- or storm-prone areas, he said. That might make it more cost-effective to invest in floating housing rather than floating farms to adapt to sea level rise, he said.
“The one in Rotterdam I think is an interesting demonstration,” he said. “I would find it hard to see it as a scalable project.”
Scaling up and contributing substantially to the sustainability of urban food systems is a challenge floating farms have in common with vertical farms, said Daniel Petrovics, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Amsterdam who has studied the scaling of several climate interventions, including in the energy and agriculture sectors.
“You should consider things like, what is the local diet, what do people eat? Is this feeding into that? What kind of stakeholders benefit from it?” he said. “Is it that it helps alleviate food poverty in a city or is it just some kind of gimmick that’s from, let’s say, a corporation that’s just looking for return on investment?”
The owners of the Dutch floating farm are already moving to expand beyond their cows.
They plan to add a second floating farm in the same harbor for vertical agriculture — growing vegetables indoors, under lights in stacks of growing beds, irrigated with water purified in part with heat from the cows’ manure.
Minke Van Wingerden sees agriculture on water as a viable response to flooding and rising sea levels and a way of bringing food production closer to consumers, meaning a lower carbon footprint.
“When you have floating farms, you are climate adaptive,” said Van Wingerden. “So you can keep on producing fresh, healthy food for the city.”
____
Walling reported from Chicago.
___
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
veryGood! (892)
Related
- Hill House Home’s Once-A-Year Sale Is Here: Get 30% off Everything & up to 75% off Luxury Dresses
- Love Buddy from 'Elf'? This company will pay you $2,500 to whip up a dish inspired by him.
- High-speed rail line linking Las Vegas and Los Angeles area gets $3B Biden administration pledge
- Verizon to offer bundled Netflix, Max discount. Are more streaming bundles on the horizon?
- Bev Priestman fired as Canada women’s soccer coach after review of Olympic drone scandal
- Taraji P. Henson on the message of The Color Purple
- Kate Middleton Channels Princess Diana With This Special Tiara
- Switchblade completes first test flight in Washington. Why it's not just any flying car.
- Olympic Skier Lindsey Vonn Coming Out of Retirement at 40
- St. Louis prosecutor who replaced progressive says he’s ‘enforcing the laws’ in first 6 months
Ranking
- Seattle man faces 5 assault charges in random sidewalk stabbings
- 6 held in Belgium and the Netherlands on suspicion of links to Russia sanction violations
- Amy Robach, T.J. Holmes debut podcast — and relationship: 'We love each other'
- Senator: Washington selects 4 Amtrak routes for expansion priorities
- Eva Longoria calls US 'dystopian' under Trump, has moved with husband and son
- South Dakota Governor proposes tighter spending amid rising inflation
- Powerball winning numbers for December 4th drawing: Jackpot now at $435 million
- Denny Laine, founding member of the Moody Blues and Paul McCartney’s Wings, dead at 79
Recommendation
-
Pie, meet donuts: Krispy Kreme releases Thanksgiving pie flavor ahead of holidays
-
Senate confirms hundreds of military promotions after Tuberville drops hold
-
Hamas officials join Nelson Mandela’s family at ceremony marking 10th anniversary of his death
-
Ryan Seacrest Details Budding Bond With Vanna White Ahead of Wheel of Fortune Takeover
-
Will Reeve, son of Christopher Reeve, gets engaged to girlfriend Amanda Dubin
-
Taliban’s abusive education policies harm boys as well as girls in Afghanistan, rights group says
-
Residents in northern Mexico protest over delays in cleaning up a mine spill
-
Video shows Alabama police officer using stun gun against handcuffed man