Underwater greenhouses are growing strawberries | Hacker News Reader

Underwater greenhouses are growing strawberries

washingtonpost.com

107 pointsSomeone41 comments

The real question is if we are changing a very productive system for a not soo good one. Octopuses growth much quicker than strawerries, and are also more expensive. Any aquaculture system in the same area will provide much more human food and better revenues (you are using a 3d volume for production instead a 2d surface).

Marine soil is not apt to cultivate, so you need to put terrestrial soil underwater (or hydroponics), and this is not cheap. There is also a real possibility of contamination of beaches with manure after a storm.

> There is also a real possibility of contamination of beaches with manure after a storm.

One of the few advantages of underwater agriculture would be the absence of storms. Only a few meters down, you won't notice a storm at all.

Trust me, you will notice it. River deltas are made of sediments and carry heavy stones and trunks for several km after a strong storm. Even the slightest flood will nuke your small underwater plastic balloon and carry the remains many miles offshore.

If you want to have any opportunity with underwater "put-some-activity-here" you absolutely need to have a way to put all your stuff safely out of the sea before a gale or a strong storm. I will not recommend to invest a single cent in underwater permanent activity that do not have a solid plan B for bad weather days.

I think they've implemented the plan "don't put it in a river outlet"

Octopuses are some of the smartest animals. Not a vegetarian, but I can't eat one. It's like eating a monkey.

Well, if this make you feel better, only dumbest octopuses will be caught and fried. They have short lives in any case.

and they don't look good on short cake.

My concerns with this are, how do they deliver power and what its requirements compared to a surface enclosed farm? Do they get sufficient light at that depth to not need artificial lighting?

While it is nice to see the sea life adapting that is merely a distraction from real issue of cost and are there negative affects on sea life?

I guess that strawberries are specifically choosen by the relatively low light requirements.

I'm very sceptic about other hidden costs like hand polinization vs minute of bottle diving, or how they had solved damages of amphibious marine snails in the fruits.

You compare apples to oranges.

Octopi would need food to live and that food is a huge cost in resources. Octopi consume a feed that could have been human to begin with. Plants need only water and reused plant material or any other natural fertilizer.

Not, we are talking about space here.

1) First of all, this space is of public nature. We could earn a lot of money for example, if we'll convert Central Park in our private artichoke's field but this will never occur. We could also dream about to privatize the mediterranean marine platform just for our own profit but this is against the current laws. If you can build a greenhouse underwater, everybody could also build a underwater hotel for instance. You can not raise a wall all around a nice beach and then ask money to people that wish to use this beach. Is public space.

2) Is economically crazy. The permits to grant a new marine farm to culture fishes are scarcer than plutonium in Mediterranean just right now and one of the reasons is the contamination. The idea of culturing cheaper products like strawberries in the same place is like to bury a diamond mine under a parking. Those strawberry fields are currently destined to a very profitable culture of marine plants (Agar based companies), fishes, shellfishes, and also turism. Even if you put enough manure to having a good annual harvest of strawberries two months each year (and you are really lucky that fishermen just accept go away and don't destroy your greenway with their trawl nets) you are just losing money.

3) Is not scalable. What they are doing would be clearly illegal for any of us. If the goal is "to feed the planet", to substitute the essential proteins provided by fishes and shellfishes by a harvest of lattices or strawberries is plain wrong. Poor people need (imperatively) more proteins in their diet, not more sugar.

> ...don't destroy your 'greenway' with their trawl nets

(ouch, is 'greenhouse' of course).

"I see possibilities for developing countries where harsh conditions make it difficult for plants to grow."

I wonder what the economics are. This can't possibly be cheaper than traditional greenhouses?

Maybe in desertic and hot countries they are cheaper

Well, how could be cheaper?. Soil and light in deserts are practically free, and you can build an insulated underground room, live in the same building and go to the work just walking. Not need to spend gasoline moving a ship and also spend electricity in air compressors.

This is agriculture without polinizators; not correct light spectrum; much higher production costs that earth based companies for the same common products in the market; and high probability of losing the harvest. Not telling the investors that thousands of marine organisms will cover any external transparent surface in a few months (blocking all the light if not regularly removed); or that their investment could end just buried by sand; or that the master plan is based in obtaining permits for eight different organisms (and explain them that you need to jump over most current marine laws). It seems that they not even asked a oceanographer what are those thing named 'water masses' and how they move.

Do they want to use copper sulfate for potato fungus? Is super-toxic for marine forms of life. Do they want to use lots of manure? Is not legal to deliberately dump manure in the sea and a risk of faecal bacteria contamination for beaches. Is their plastic fabric covered by tasty green microscopic algae guaranteed against sea urchin's mandibles?.

Bad interest conflicts with local fishermen, algae harvesters, ecologists?. How they plan to deal with this?.

Insurance or private security? This is a high risk activity for the workers. Aquaculture companies need often to hire private security for marine cages (because the risk of thief).

Either they can provide a reasonable anwser to this questions or they are not serious players (or is just a scam).

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see what being under the ocean has to do with anything?

You can get humidity in a simple greenhouse, and there is no more CO2 in air exposed to the ocean than there is in ordinary air.

Ocean-floor real estate is very abundant.

Except you will probably need a very specific depth-range.

I'd think of it as part art project, part developing technology that might one day be useful else where.

The dangers in sending down divers to pick strawberries alone make it not practical as a business.

Yeah it seems odd they use divers, instead of some sort of pulley system to lift the balloons to the surface for maintenance and harvesting.

For comparison, you don't (usually) dive to lobster pots. They have a buoy on the surface and you pull them up.

My impression is that they take in ocean water that then evaporates as the source of water. This means a very stable humidity, in addition to stable temperature, essentially for free.

Also, the oceans absorb most of the CO2 emitted by various processes, so if you evaporate it I would guess it comes back out into the air.

Salt is toxic to most plants.

the evaporation does not contain salt

It does.

It would interesting to see if large-scale production would be feasible. Backyard farms are great, but it's only with the economies of scale that farming makes any sense commercially.

So could there be an undersea farm, with living quarters, hundreds of acres of plants, a system for conserving and recycling the soil, and protection from storms?

It's not a crazy idea. If you could move farming into shallow ocean waters, you'd free up a lot of land. Just guessing, but you also might have natural protection from cosmic events like CMEs. It bears watching.

"The company is also planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign next week to support further development." Why would a CEO wait till the week after an article with this many readers to launch such a campaign? Surely he could have launched it before this article?

Maybe because it's good marketing? If someone reads about it on the Washington Post, they're more apt to believe and contribute than someone who sees a random Kickstarter campaign with nothing but a Youtube video.

I think the above poster is talking about how everyone will forget about it in a week. Better to have it started now where everyone can just contribute to the campaign after they read the article.

I'm more curious why this needs to be crowdfunded at all? Seems like a venture where very few people would be able to understand the "Risks and Challenges".

New, unproven and expensive/risky technologies aren't a great candidate for crowdfunding.

Probably because their campaign is not directed at americans, this is a small italian company so they likely focus on advertising in italian.

If the water is coming from desalination, why not desalinate and feed a surface greenhouse? The only advantages are the co2 and temperature.

where do they mention how light gets to the plants?

It says that the greenhouses are transparent. At 20 feet down that would mean something like 25% of the sunlight is left [1]. I'm surprised that strawberries will grow in that little light, since they don't do as well in the shade.

[1]: Rough estimate based on http://oceansjsu.com/105d/exped_briny/13.html.

>25% of the sunlight.

That's probably why their looking into growing fungi.

Same for me, I'm was quite suspicious about this.

Especially also that you might not get the whole spectrum at this depth and this might be problematic for some plants.

I'd imagine they wouldn't be very sweet.

Really interresting I hope to see more of this =) such projects are truly inspiring, what we still can develope and build in this world.

I don't see the point of growing strawberries underwater, but it could perhaps be used for shade-lovingplants like coffee.

I see it 20 years from now: "Ocean floor crops: Gift or curse? Ocean floor pollution and released nutrients ecosystem problems"

Seems a bit silly.

Ughhhhh websites should do automatic unit translation, I'm pretty sure oceans are not at nearly boiling temperature.

Yeah, that would be really neat. We are already doing it in enough cases for time.

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