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Farmsteads
Fri, 05/23/2008 - 17:11 — jurisimprudent
I'll throw this out there:
If one could do it cheaply enough, there's no reason that platforms devoted exclusively to farming would have to be on spars.
Instead, you could construct hundreds if not thousands of little wooden planters that simply float on the water's surface.
I don't think it would take too huge an engineering feat to make even planters filled with dirt buoyant enough. If you lash these together, you could keep them near your seastead.
I would think there could be a way to design such plant boxes that they wouldn't automatically sink every time it rains too much, Harvesting crops, of course, would be rather expensive. Modern combines are designed for land use.
But as I say, I'm just throwing this out there to let the magic of the collective mind refine the idea.
UPDATE TO THIS POST:
Wayne Gramlich notes below that I'm late to the party on this idea. Check out the fascinating page he references here: http://www.geocities.com/vacoyecology/Bubble_ponds_fluke_boats.html
Tsunamis and cost
I'm allowing that, unlike spar-design seasteads, these farmsteads would be vulnerable to the odd natural disaster. I'm just positing that you could potentially set up such an operation knowing that such losses will occasionally come your way and prepared to bear the cost. You could buy crop insurance to help ease the occasional blow.
Inches...
FYI, tsunamis are inches high in deep water.
-Joel
Food & freshwater, no problem
At ocean depths of 1,000 to 3,000 ft, the temperature is around 40 Deg F.
Seawater Air-Conditioning
http://www.evelop.com/en/projects/swac.asp
http://www.seaconinternational.com/index.html
http://www.aloha.com/~craven/coolair.html
Fresh water-
http://www.aloha.com/~craven/hcane.html
http://www.seasolarpower.com/benefits.html
No dirt required-
http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/aquaponic.html
http://www.aquaponics.com/InfoVillageAquaponics02.htm
http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/
The protein
http://ooa.unh.edu/
http://www.oceanspar.com/
www.aquacopia.com
“Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshiped.”
Fantastic links
These are all fascinating.
I'll say this about the relative costs: hydroponics and greenhouses are expensive ways of growing food, even on land.
There's no reason to think they'd be cheaper at sea - indeed, everything you'd do would probably include a fixed cost of floatation.
If the costs of floating a farm project are a factor nomatter what form the project takes, I'd say that cheaper farming that approximates traditional methods might be more cost effective.
(Whether my idea approximates traditional methods - or is even feasible - is probably still an open question, I'll grant you.)
Sounds like a good idea. I
Sounds like a good idea. I think you´d have to make sure that the crops wouldn´t come in contact with seawater though as that probably would kill everything.
Right
I'm sure that's exactly right.
Well, mere plants would
Well, mere plants would probably not be as bothered by wave action bobbing them up and down. Well, with the exception of corn (that whole inner ear thing).
There's still the issue of what crops would grow in that environment. Most terrestrial crops need lots of non-salt water, soil to root in with biological nutrients, etc. It might work with some salt/tidal marsh plants to establisha mini-habitat. It would be difficult to grow anything that gets tall like mangrove trees, at least on a raft, but such a species would probably be invaluable to stabilization of shoreline on an artificial island and might even be workable on the more stable main seastead.
Inflatable support structure
A number of us independently reached the same basic conclusion. Here is the link you need to see: Bubble Farms. The basic concept is that inflatable structures can be made remarkably cheap. As long as human life is not at stake, losing an occasional platform is just an economic issue.
Farming, water production, and power can be taken off the spar and loaded onto inexpensive inflatable structures.
Umm . . . right.
So . . . um, that is about the coolest possible incarnation of the idea I could have ever imagined.
Why isn't this kind of stuff getting posted on the wiki?
I mean that page really is spectacular. Way to go. No need to reinvent that particular wheel.
Keep prodding us
Short answer. We need all the help we can get to organize these ideas into a more coherent picture. Just asking the questions, forces me to dig into my mail archives and fish out the relevant stuff. So, thanks for posting the question.
Wiki
I'm currently putting as many links, information and ideas in wiki as i can find on the forums. However, some ideas are cool, but I see no "objective" way of putting these proposals in an `objective` manner. Please check out http://wiki.seasteading.org/index.php/Design_Proposals .
Thanks for flaging bubble
Thanks for flaging bubble farms Wayne:
For everyone's information I was involved with the original Oceania Project in a small way. I'm also in several space organisations. And I have a Degree in sustainable Development, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy,water and sewerage.
Thanks to you
You did all of the hard work on that one.
I'm itching to get a little further along so that we can actually try and get some of these floating farm ideas tried out.
Glad to see this
Yes, I think bubble farms sound like a good direction. I'm still concerned about how they would handle in rough seas.
A combine harvester has to
A combine harvester has to be moved over the land, which is a hassle. If all your farmland is on narrow concrete barges, it can be towed underneath the machinery, and becomes much more like livestock: pulled in to be "milked" and "fed", then sent out to "pasture" for a while. I think it might be better to have a much larger number of much cheaper, smaller, open, unpowered boats, with little more than a drip irrigation system, and have mangroves in most of them to keep the waves and salt spray off of the cache crops in the inner circle. Not sure how many you would need to build a storm-proof breakwater, but I'm guessing that would be cheaper than all the glass, electronics, and engines in the fluke boats pictured. -Joel
You really don't want all
You really don't want all your little farm rafts fouling each other's lines. I think you'd find a model wherer they are moored at each end, and you work along the lines to be more effective. Like trappers lines, only connected. either that or like crab/lobster pots where they are individually moored along an imaginary line.
Saltwater Soybean
This is an interesting possibility - uses seawater and produces a fuel we can use for diesel generators and export to others.
http://www.biodieselmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=1913
Free Floating Farms
(I feel terrible that I can't contribute more often, but there are only so many hours in a day...)
The idea I have been playing around with in my head is that each farmstead would be free floating. It would have a GPS receiver and some level of communication ability -- probably some revision of 802.11[n-z]. As the farmstead drifts further and further away, a little robotic boat gets their locatations, fetches them and tows them back closer to home. This would all be automatic with no user intervention. When bad weather occurs, the owner has to decide whether to dump crops, deflate and store, or risk it riding out the storm.
Quote from Wayne: "When
Quote from Wayne: "When bad weather occurs, the owner has to decide whether to dump crops, deflate and store, or risk it riding out the storm."
There is a forth option if the floating farm is air tight; sink the thing down to a depth of ten meters. Most plants should survive few hours at 3 atmosphere's and partual dark. Wave energy is significantly reduced at ten meters and damage would be minimual. A popup bouyant snorkel refloats the structure. This should work for most of my bubble ponds, some other medium and heavy industrial plant. i.e. reverse osmosis plants. With pressurised storm rooms and equipressure sealed living spaces it could work with an entire seastead. Equipressure means the pressure in the structure matches the sea water out side. 3 atm at 10 meters. Submersable sea steads may sound strange but the more I look at it the easyer it seems.
The trick is to make it go down 10 meters and sit at that depth. A few surface, storm rugged bouys on 10 meter lines will do the job. Fill the inflatable floatation cells with water. Keep the jet skii sized snorkel ready to pop up an grab air if the thing is pulled deeper by sub surface currents. Sub surface currents are likely to be rare.
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For everyone's information I was involved with the original Oceania Project in a small way. I'm also in several space organisations. And I have a Degree in sustainable Development, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy,water and sewerage.
reef farming fish and other
reef farming fish and other marine flora and fauna, wouldn't be that hard at all.
with bio-rock, very very easy.
http://globalcoral.org/Biorock%20%20Mineral%20Accretion%20Technology%20f...
I think seasteaders should do thier best to live in Rome like the Proverbial Romans do. Adopt and Adapt to the Sea rather than try importing land based farming practices.
Algaes, Seaweeds, fish, squid, abalone, oysters, mussels... lets face ithere's plenty that can be grown in the sea as it is without introducing all that other material and processes. I think the best model for mariculture is one very similar in spirit to permaculture on land. Live gently, have a low impact and take only what you need.
You could also make a ref garden far more resistant to storm events than any surface based system. The intertidal surf zone... is just about the most challenging place to do anything aside from surf.
Sweet idea
Sweet idea
Combine harvester not a problem.
A combine harvester is not a problem if your using floating farm plots for say Nupa Wild wheet a salt water crop . You simply make the crop floats about 3 - 5 meters wide and twice as long. Make the harvester a twin hull job a meter wider. Feed the farm through the harvester not the harvester over the crop. The rest is easy. Moore your crop floats together into a single large surface to reduce wave damage at the edges.
I have a new float farm design for broad acea crops, using interlocking plastic pannels and unloading the membrane.
For everyone's information I was involved with the original Oceania Project in a small way. I'm also in several space organisations. And I have a Degree in sustainable Development, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy,water and sewerage.