Rotterdam's floating dairy farm project
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There is also a local farmers show where they let you come and see the cows. I love standing there and seeing the amazement in peoples eyes as they realise that cows are huge, smelly and hot. People touch them, they are fury and warm and nice. Yes, we kill them and eat them. There is a massive disconnect here. Urban farms are a really good idea.
Oh and third boring story. We had a friend over and we sat outside. We could hear the cows moo-ing. She didn't know what the noise was and was amazed when we told her. They moo because the farmer has sold the calves. It takes them days to mourn the loss. Drink up your milk.
[edit] I drink milk and eat meat. Not much, but I still enjoy both. I think the fact that as a society we 'hide' this from most people is wrong. Let people know about where their food comes from and let them choose.
I was witness to a cattle being slaughtered while staying on a beef property. It is confronting, I'll give you that. However I still enjoy eating meat but I strive to always eat locally produced and I try and eat what is in season. Again this is more of a quality preference than a moral stand. I worked in a butcher for a while and that taught me a lot.
I am lucky to live in an area abundant in food, so I do feel for those trapped in a big city at the end of industrial supply chains. For dinner tonight I had freshly caught fish that were swimming around yesterday. The difference is amazing.
Admittedly, I'm from Ireland, where there's a fairly high number of cattle and sheep, grazed outdoors, on a very traversable landmass, but I still find it a little unfathomable that the difference in other countries could be so extreme that people would really be the disconnected. Particularly chefs.
The only way animals were kept in the past was by using resources humans couldn't use themselves. Cows and sheep grazing on marginal land that can't be used as farmland. Pigs fed on food scrap and in pannage.
That is a most obscure statement. Where I live, northern Europe, people couldn't survive without animals, until historically recent inventions of transport. Not just cows and sheep grazing marginal land (though that is not insignificant, because all land is "marginal" here) but also because animals have provided much of the essentials materials for life: skins, wool, even the bones were used for material. That is now largely replaced by using mineral oil resources, which will not last indefinitely.
And if you are promoting "organic and sustainable" agriculture, remember that to do it, you will need to increase the amount of animals in agriculture - otherwise you cannot get the fertilization and nutrition needed by plants.
Animals were also kept on good farmland, because you need them to pull your plough.
Cats have frequently been kept in and about granaries to keep down losses to rats.
All of which is by way of saying that animals have been kept wherever and whenever people felt they were worth it. That might have been because the cost of maintaining them was low, or because the benefit of having them was high.
And many of us do regularly, in the form of de-husked, or rolled, oats [1]. I eat them in my muesli almost every morning.
Rotterdam is surrounded by farmland, what's the point of putting them on water? If anything this would be an environmental disaster with bovine excrements being flushed into the ocean...
And if 2/3rd's of your land will be flooded (which is has been the case since well forever as most of those windmills are water pumps that pump water out of the ground) you have bigger problems than finding your cows a new home (Belgium works just fine also).
It's an expensive and more or less pointless exercise, heck based on the cost of building artificial islands especially now since China became a world leader in doing so if you really want to expand into the ocean that's a better idea.
The excrement from cattle farms is a horrible source of pollution, it's one of the main sources of pollution of water in the world, raising cattle on barges means that you are going to pump metric tons of shit into your coastal waters which would have very bad effects on the sea life.
On the ground floor [..] water from the cows’ urine will be purified and used to grow red clover, alfalfa and grass under artificial light for fodder. Cow’s manure will either be used or dispatched to a nearby farm.
While the dairy machinery itself is usually well cleaned after every milking, and the milk itself will be tested for bacteria counts, the areas surrounding a dairy are almost always very, very difficult to keep clean. Even with regularly cleaned dairy machinery, the heady aroma mix of sloppy faeces, urine and dried milk will be pervasive.
I'm personally not bothered by it, having worked on a dairy for several seasons, but I can imagine that not everyone will be quite as comfortable in that environment.
Would floating farms fare well in hurricanes? Vertical farms, on the other hand, could supplement some of the food for places which are too far from farmland (although upstate New York is not all that far) or places inhospitable to farming.
That's not to say they can't be designed to withstand hurricanes. You need a very, very sturdy pier to anchor them in place, but it's not impossible to imagine such a thing.
The good news is Rotterdam doesn't get a lot of hurricanes, and nor does San Francisco or Seattle.
Unlikely, however they could be moved out of the way of the hurricane and moved back afterwards. The floating part would be a way to get mobility (and extra land-use).
This is fairly impractical. It is one thing for an individual moored structure to be moved from the path of a hurricane (e.g. a moored semisubmersible, as is done in the Gulf of Mexico), but an array of dozens of unwieldly floating wind turbines is something else entirely. Removing each would require several vessels and several hours for hook-up and seabed disconnect(once removal vessels are on site, which could take quite some time). Then they'd have to be towed slowly to safe waters, and somehow moored again or towed around continuously.
What wind turbines? The article is about actual farms on barges/floating platforms, not about windfarms. Sure you'd need a bunch of tugs to move them around and there's the question of power and whether you'd leave the cattle on during moving, but there's no seabed mooring involved or anything like that.
You might be. I'm not.