Journey into the World’s First Underwater Farm | Hacker News Reader

Journey into the World’s First Underwater Farm

atlasobscura.com

22 pointsthecosas6 comments

Not what I was expecting at all. I was expecting something more akin to kelp farming as recently described on a 60 Minutes episode: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/seaweed-farming-and-its-surpris...

Growing conventional crops underwater seems like a non-starter idea if you need to create a walled-off environment for them to grow. What makes more sense is to find plants that can grow in salty water and feed off the natural environment.

> During winter months or cloudy days, artificial light from LED lamps placed inside the spheres supplements the natural light

I have also wondered about living under water and farming there. However, this made me cringe. I'd like to see less interference/pollution in the ocean, not more. Especially as the owner of a dive shop, I would expect some more reverence for marine life.

I wonder if this holds lessons for farming in space? They're both rather closed environments, though the sea obviously provides extra water (and more). There won't be cloudy days in space!

For those worried about negative environmental effects of structures on the seafloor, people actually sink old ships to create artificial reefs: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/artificial-reef.html

Though if this was industrialized too much, I bet delivering a bunch of chemical fertilizers probably would create environmental problems.

Obviously not useful to grow land plants in these sorts of domes for useful crop yields in general. Ignoring the complexity and cost, at 22 feet you've lost most of the red spectrum and are starting to lose orange and yellow. That's a big penalty on the available energy. Maaaaybe for some weird pharma thing?

However it's probably(?) a pretty interesting and cheap experiment area.

It is useful, you don't need to worry about insects and infectious diseases. Most pesticides are damaging to the surrounding ecology. Moreover, with the way industrial farming is currently done, most plants are genetically similar to each other. This means that if a bacterial outbreak were to occur, it could potentially wipe out many crops. In an enclosed environment, you eliminate these things. Although, you could still do it in a green house.

As a question, "can we grow land plants under water?" I think it is interesting, as a strategy for increasing the availability of arable land? I'm not convinced.

That said, if you can get enough plants to provide oxygen recycling of CO2 in the habitat, then at a larger scale you might be a solution to one of the problems of long duration underwater habitats.

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