ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — On the upper deck of a three-tiered structure anchored near downtown Rotterdam, brown and white cows graze on hay that falls from a conveyor belt overhead and orange peels salvaged from supermarket juice machines in the port city. . The overhead canopies protect the cows from the sun and collect rainwater, which they eventually drink.
Sometimes the Maas-Rijn-Ijssel cows, named after three rivers in the Netherlands, walk towards a machine that milks them automatically, or step out of the way of a passing robot to mop up manure to be turned into organic fertilizer.
“We call our cows upper-class ladies,” says Minke van Wingerden of the Floating Farm, which sells the milk, cheese and buttermilk produced by the cows in a small shop on dry land next to the harbor pier.
The Floating Farm, which has been in operation since 2019 and bills itself as the world’s first such farm, is not on completely new terrain. Efforts to farm on or in water are as old as the Aztecs, who built artificial islets to grow food long ago in what is now Mexico.
But it’s an idea that’s gaining new attention as a way to combat both food insecurity and food security. challenges of climate change. And it doesn’t need to be as complicated as the Dutch farm, which was founded after Van Wingerden’s husband, Peter, witnessed the food shortages that hit New York after Hurricane Sandy hit the city in 2012.
In coastal and low-lying areas of India and Bangladesh, a non-governmental organization is reviving the traditional practice of creating floating rafts that can keep seedlings above monsoon floodwaters that can drown crops.
The Kolkata-based South Asia Environmental Forum has made some technological improvements for what it calls “climate-resilient floating agriculture.” Bamboo rafts are built larger and heavier to better withstand storms. Plastic sheeting and shade nets protect delicate plants, and solar-powered pumps collect rainwater to water the seedlings. The organization has partnered with local research institutes to provide farmers with the best possible climate-tolerant seeds and to pass on knowledge on pest control. Communications director Amrita Chatterjee said the situation could become more urgent if pests proliferate during extremely hot times like this summer, when temperatures reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) in some places.
Chatterjee said rafts are “not a very traditional form of agriculture” and getting used to them requires patience. But within a few years, the number of floating farms operating in different villages more than doubled to 500. Crops grown on floating platforms include herbs, vegetables such as spinach and capsicum, and farmers can also grow crabs to be fed for marketing in floating boxes.
“Slowly everyone is starting to pay attention,” Chatterjee said.
Chatterjee said the rafts were helping food security with increasingly erratic monsoons. They also helped when the Indian state of West Bengal was hit in a one-two punch with a cyclone and then COVID-19 in 2020, he said.
Chatterjee said farmers using the rafts are now feeding themselves and selling some of the surplus in local markets. His group hopes the idea can be scaled up to make it more commercially viable.
Floating farms will clearly be scalable in Southeast Asia in the coming years, but lack of education about the technology may hinder adoption in some places, said Craig Jenkins, an Ohio State University sociology professor.
The owners of the Floating Farm in Rotterdam cite several reasons for putting the farms on the water. This involves urbanization placing more people in cities, making it logical to move food sources closer to them. They say the extreme weather conditions triggered by climate change—heavy rainfalls and flooding of cities and farmland—are climate-adapting their approach to feeding these cities.
The success of floating farms will likely vary by region, said Jake Boswell, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Ohio State University. While a large portion of the world’s population lives in coastal areas, only a subset of these communities farm in flood- or storm-prone areas, he said. This means it may be more cost-effective to invest in floating housing rather than floating farms to adapt to sea level rise, he said.
“I think the one in Rotterdam was an interesting show,” he said. “I have a hard time seeing this as a scalable project.”
Scaling up urban food systems and contributing significantly to their sustainability is a challenge floating farms share with vertical farms, said Daniel Petrovics, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam who studies the scaling of various climate interventions. energy and agriculture sectors.
“It is necessary to think about issues such as what is local nutrition and what people eat. Does this feed him? What kind of stakeholders benefit from this?” said. “Is it helping to alleviate food poverty in a city, or is it just some kind of stunt by a company looking for a return on investment?”
The owners of the Dutch floating farm are already taking action to expand beyond their cows.
They plan to add a second floating farm in the same port for vertical farming; growing vegetables indoors, under lights in piles of growing beds, watered with water partially purified by heat from cow manure.
Minke Van Wingerden sees hydroponics as a viable response to floods and rising sea levels and a way to bring food production closer to consumers, meaning a lower carbon footprint.
“When you have floating farms, you acclimate,” Van Wingerden said. “So you can continue to produce fresh, healthy food for the city.”
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Walling reported from Chicago.
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