The world's first floating farm making waves in Rotterdam | Hacker News Reader

The world's first floating farm making waves in Rotterdam

bbc.com

23 pointsklausjensen9 comments

"Built-up urban areas may not seem like the most sensible places to run farms, but reducing the distance food travels before it reaches consumers' plates makes environmental sense as it reduces transport pollution."

Does it really? I feel like there's a lot of naive thinking about "carbon economics." How much carbon is actually saved here, especially if this goes to any level of scale.

Now the cows are nearer the milk consumers, but farther from their feed/grass which will need to be transported. Waste will need to be transported, to fertilize fields someplace else. They are using valuable urban real estate (it's more like a barge in a port, which is also "real estate" of sorts).

If you want to farm plants indoor, you need lots of energy, buildings...

A list of these projects "smell" off. Idk if this is for the sake of investors, environmentalists or what but a lot doesn't seem kosher.

Remember "corn based ethanol" about 15 years ago? It was a global project to produce biofuel in several major maize producers (US, Australia..) as a carbon reducing exercise.

It went "live." Farming subsidies. Refiner subsidies. Fuel tax incentives. In Australia, "E10" was available everywhere.

After a very substantial cost/effort someone did the sums and realized it would be impossible to scale. We just can't grow that much corn, and growing corn is not environmentally free. Still, it went a remarkably long way.

I just don't think milk delivery between Rotterdam and fields 25km away is a problem that merits this kind of solution. Its hammering a thumb tack with a sledgehammer.

> Does it really?

I would point out that like most of Western Europe, the Netherlands has an absurd abundance of milk being produced. The state buys it up en-masse and, for lack of a better option, destroys it.

Therefore I would think the only way a farm like this has any hope of success is if the government subsidizes it.

https://www.citylab010.nl/plannen/floatingfarmeducatie

Although the article says that financing is "100% private" (the CEO is an ex-accountant it seems), the article also states:

1) there will be a 42.600 euro subsidy for developing lessons for local kids about the farm

(in case you're wondering why that would happen:)

2) a number of schools have committed to buying the milk produced at a given price (schools are public in the Netherlands, so this amounts to a government subsidy)

3) the cows are not actually being bred on the farm. Rather, they're bred elsewhere and then brought onto the farm during their years where they give milk, the farm is subsidized

4) the farm is being constructed as part of a government plan to reinvent the old fruit harbour of Rotterdam, and only "Clean Tech Medical and Food" companies are welcome, but also get tax advantages and don't have to pay for their territory.

So no, it doesn't make sense. With government support, it may at some point in the future start making sense.

Oh... It certainly wouldn't make economic sense. I meant, does it make sense in a carbon counting sense. Does producing milk in the city so you don't have to transport actually cause less emissions?

A light truck emits at least 200g/km of CO2, up to 1000g/km for a heavier truck. A single truck doing a 20km round trip daily will emit 3 to 15 tons of CO2 per year.

Wind energy is abundant in the Netherlands, and buildings seem to pop up out of nowhere, so neither would be a problem.

hum...40 dairy cows will produce around 1800 Kg of urine and faeces each day, 12800 Kg of liquid manure that must be safely removed in some way each week (because you can't just throw it in the sea untreated). Avoid at least some of this product leaking repeatedly to the marine environment in the cleaning chores seems a very difficult task.

The only problem with excrement hitting the marine environment is if it accumulates on the shore or causes unpleasant odors to humans.

Remember that the ocean is a soup of all of its inhabitants' excretions and decaying corpses, and happily consumes stuff like that. Ocean life thrives around raw sewage pipe outlets.

This is exactly wrong - sewage is far too concentrated, and there is a long history of slowly cleaning up raw sewage outflows in the EU. There's no way you'd be allowed to dump a dairy farm's effluent directly into the sea.

The only problem with lots of excrements being regularly trow to water courses in a single point without treatment is that is illegal in EU.

Recently Brussels fined Spain €12 million for failing to treat urban waste water in nine points of the coast. The idea of dutch floating farms being allowed at the same time to throw faeces and enteric bacteria directly to a populated port in the heart of the EU would be, obviously, very difficult to explain to the public opinion.

And I'm not even mentioning the powerful mussel's farm industry in Holland. They would be extremely upset.

This is horrible. For the animals.

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