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Comment by rukuu_001 | Hacker News Reader

Aqua-farming shellfish is the closest thing to free protein we're going to get.

My folks are involved with farming mussels in New Zealand. The farms are in a river mouth, putting the nitrogen and phosphate runoff from farms to good use. The phytoplankton they eat is replenished 500m down-current from the mussels.

There's one major risk - the 'spat' - the baby mussels used to start a vertical mussel line - are harvested when they're washed up on a beach. Sometimes, there's no spat and no one knows why. The concern is that climate change will result in less, or no spat, and then no more mussel aquaculture.

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My biggest concern is that along with the nitrogen and phosphate runoff come pesticides and other less savory compounds that then bio-accumulate in the farmed shellfish.

My immediate thought. Agricultural runoff isn't on the top of the list of things I want to ingest, even vicariously.

yes, unfortunately, that indeed is a concern. It should be examined.

Do they bioaccumulate? What exact compounds are your concerned about?

I live in Connecticut, Long Island sound is like my back yard, the waters are green from too much Nitrogen which blooms algae.

All plants need Nitrogen to grow, there is a surplus for various reasons in the sound, that surplus needs to come down and this idea is great.

I'm curious whats worse, pesticides directly applied, or the possibility of pesticides in run off?

It depends on whether or not they bioaccumulate^W -- checking wikipedia apparently the word I want is biomagnification.

The basic idea is that as you move up the food chain the concentration of toxins gets higher. So a plant might have a relatively low level of toxin absorbed even if it was directly applied, but a shellfish that consumed algae that were exposed to the toxin downstream from the farm might have a considerably higher level.

I don't know a whole lot about the details in this specific case, but that's my concern.

I visited a farm in British Columbia about ten years ago that was raising bivalves (geoducks I think) and they'd worked out how to raise them all the way from fertilization through all the microscopic stages. In retrospect, they probably had to do that because clams aren't polite enough to attach to something, en masse, that you can collect on the beach.

Is because baby clams have a lot of predators, specially crabs and starfishes, so they mums either nurse it under the shell, or try to spread it for the widest area possible.

Honest question: How does that scale up? At first guess, I'd imagine there's insufficient area in (non-polluted) river mouths to create a large enough sustainable supply for world-wide demand.

Why does it need to scale up? I think scaling up is what caused problems with our planet, we need to start thinking locally.

For Connecticut, this is a local issue (too much Nitrogen in the sound) and this is a local solution that not only _reverses_ a problem, but produces real food and economy.

This economy doesn't have to be at scale, other places on this earth have different problems and require different solutions.

Research "greening the deserts" on youtube for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBLZmwlPa8A

We need to work with nature, not against it. Let nature do the work. A healthy natural system is the true meaning of wealth in this world, it works without ANY human or oil expense. A fly-wheel system that generates money without effort.

Reference: http://www.ct.gov/deep/cwp/view.asp?a=2719&q=325572&deepNav_... | "Each summer, the bottom waters in the western half of Long Island Sound experience hypoxia, or very low levels of dissolved oxygen. Extensive monitoring and modeling of Long Island Sound have identified the excessive discharge of nitrogen from human activities as the primary pollutant causing hypoxia. "

>> Aqua-farming shellfish is the closest thing to free protein we're going to get.

I think biomanufacturing of protein via bacteria/algae could be the cheapest. For example there's even a company, prottero, making sugar via bacteria at 1/3 of the cost of sugar cane.

And theoretically with those of methods , you might be able to feed the world from an area the size of new jersey.

Feeding the world isn't the issue -

1) The world being able to afford it's food is the issue.

2) getting food to people in time without spoilage is the issue.

Minimizing the environmental impact of farming isn't an issue?

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