by ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — On the upper deck of a three-level structure moored near the center of Rotterdam, brown and white cows graze on hay dropped from a conveyor belt onto their heads and orange peels recovered from juice machines. of supermarkets in the port city. . The canopies protect the cows from the sun and collect rainwater that they will eventually drink.
Sometimes the Maas-Rijn-Ijssel cows (named after three Dutch rivers) approach a machine that automatically milks them, or move out of the way of a slowly passing robot to clean up manure that will be turned into organic fertilizer.
“We call our cows recycled ladies,” says Minke van Wingerden of Floating Farm, which sells the milk, cheese and whey produced by the cows in a small shop on the mainland next to its dock in the port.
The Floating Farm, which has been operational since 2019 and is billed as the first farm of its kind in the world, is not on brand new land. Efforts to implement agriculture on 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 getting new attention as a way to address both food security and the challenges of climate change. And it doesn’t have to be as sophisticated as the Dutch farm, which emerged 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 a traditional practice of creating floating rafts that can keep seedlings above monsoon flood waters that can drown crops.
The Kolkata-based South Asia Forum for the Environment has made some technological improvements for what it calls “climate-resilient floating farming.” Bamboo rafts are built larger and heavier to better withstand storms. Plastic covers and shade nets protect fragile plants, and solar-powered pumps collect rainwater to water seedlings. And the organization has partnered with local research institutes to supply farmers with the best possible, climate-resistant seeds and pass on pest control knowledge. Communications director Amrita Chatterjee said that can become more urgent when pests proliferate during times of extreme heat, like this summer, where temperatures reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) in some places.
Chatterjee said rafts “are not a very conventional type of farming” and it takes patience to get used to them. But in just a few years they have more than doubled, to 500, the number of floating farms operating in different towns. Vegetables such as medicinal plants, spinach and chilies are among the products grown on the floating platforms, and farmers can also raise crabs to fatten them for the market in floating boxes.
“Little by little, everyone is getting interested,” Chatterjee said.
With monsoons becoming more erratic, the rafts have helped food security, Chatterjee said. They also came in handy when the Indian state of West Bengal was hit by a double cyclone followed by COVID-19 in 2020, she said.
Farmers using the rafts now feed themselves and sell some of the surplus in local markets, Chatterjee said. His team hopes the idea can be expanded to make it more commercially viable.
Floating farms will clearly be scalable in the coming decades in Southeast Asia, but educating about the technology may be a barrier to adoption in some places, said Craig Jenkins, a sociology professor at Ohio State University.
In Rotterdam, the owners of the Floating Farm cite several reasons for putting the farms on the water. That includes urbanization that brings more people to cities, making it sensible to bring food sources closer to them. They say the extreme weather caused by climate change – heavy rain and flooding of cities and farmland – makes their climate-adaptive approach to feeding those cities.
Jake Boswell, associate professor of landscape architecture at Ohio State University, said the success of floating farms will likely vary by region. While much of the world’s population lives in coastal areas, only a subset of those communities also farm in areas prone to flooding or storms, he said. That could make it more profitable to invest in floating homes rather than floating farms to adapt to rising sea levels, he said.
“I think Rotterdam is an interesting demonstration,” he said. “I would have a hard time seeing it as a scalable project.”
Scaling up and substantially contributing to the sustainability of urban food systems is a challenge that floating farms have in common with vertical farms, said Daniel Petrovics, a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam who has studied the scaling up of several climate interventions, including in the energy and agricultural sectors.
“You should consider things like what the local diet is, what people eat. Is this fueling that? What kind of stakeholders benefit from it? he said. “Does it help alleviate food poverty in a city or is it just some kind of gimmick by, say, a corporation just looking for a return on investment?”
The owners of the Dutch floating farm are already taking steps 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 stacks of growing beds, irrigated with water purified in part by heat from cow manure.
Minke Van Wingerden sees water-based agriculture as a viable response to flooding and sea level rise and a way to bring food production closer to consumers, meaning a lower carbon footprint.
“When you have floating farms, you adapt to the climate,” 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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