6 ms·

Rotterdam's floating dairy farm project

43 points by kawera 10y ago

Aelinsaar 10y ago
Well, the degree to which costs would have to be scaled down can't be understated; 2.5 million euros for 40 cows. Yikes.
- rmason 10y ago
  Unless it doubles as a tourist attraction that charges admission the economics will not work.
- randomdata 10y ago
  Here I was thinking that it wasn't ridiculously out of line like some of these urban farming projects. Looking at the farms for sale in my area, there's a traditional land-based dairy farm in a rural area – with 50kg of quota (approximately 50 cows) – listed at $4M Canadian dollars, or just shy of €2.8M at the current exchange rate.
  - krrrh 10y ago
    Thise numbers say a lot more about the need to reform Canada's supply management system for dairy production which is basically analogous to taxi medallions for dairy cows. It's why cheese and milk are roughly twice as expensive as in the US.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      The US isn't much better. The subsidies farmers get block more efficiently farmed dairy here in New Zealand and are a source of some frustration to NZ farmers.
mc32 10y ago
"My husband ... visited New York, there was Hurricane Sandy and he saw the shelves were empty; there was only food for two days. He thought we had to do things in another way, and the idea came: why not build a floating farm?” 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.
- astrodust 10y ago
  If they're anything like the casino barges in the Katrina wake, the answer is "No": http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4024377.html http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4024377.html 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.
  - 13of40 10y ago
    Of all the things we could add to try and revitalize Seattle's waterfront, I'm not sure the pervasive smell of cow poop is the answer. We've got places like Duvall and Enumclaw for that.
- masklinn 10y ago
  > Would floating farms fare well in hurricanes? 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).
  - cr1895 10y ago
    >however they could be moved out of the way of the hurricane and moved back afterwards. 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.
hexscrews 10y ago
It'll be interesting to see what happens when the technology to generate milk from artificial mammary glands becomes a thing. We are already on the path to eliminating the need for bovine meat processing.
- stephenr 10y ago
  > We are already on the path to eliminating the need for bovine meat processing. You might be. I'm not.
legulere 10y ago
This is another step in the wrong direction. Animals are very resource intensive and give almost no resources in return. 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.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Historically horses were fed oats because oats were viewed as an inferior meal. But humans certainly can eat oats. 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.
  - phillc73 10y ago
    > But humans certainly can eat oats. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_oats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_oats
- ptaipale 10y ago
  >This is another step in the wrong direction. Animals are very resource intensive and give almost no resources in return. 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.
masklinn 10y ago
I wonder how they're going to handle and get rid of manure, the render doesn't show anything for that, and you don't want to dump raw manure in the water.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  I'd expect it to be collected and sold? There's lots of demand for fertilizer.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    In the volume cows make it, demand would be satisfied fast. New Zealand's waterways aren't dead or dying while people want the run off. They are being destroyed because of the volume dairy farms produce so badly exceeds that which is easily used.
    - phillc73 10y ago
      I think this will probably be one of the biggest challenges for this project. Bovine excrement and odour are very briefly mentioned in the article, but not nearly in enough detail. 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.
- tremon 10y ago
  [..] a special membrane floor that lets bovine urine soak through. A machine will mop up dry cow dung [..] 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.
monk_e_boy 10y ago
A bit off topic: I watched a TV show, it was a competition for the best young chef. At one point they took the chefs out into the country side to cook somewhere, on the drive they got caught up in some sheep that were out in the road. All the chefs in the car looked around in amazement, one said, "This is where our meat comes from?"... I was just amazed. They had no idea how big a sheep is, or that it is a real live animal with feelings and a desire for food, shelter, comfort etc. 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.
- brc 10y ago
  I agree that people should be more connected to their food supply, even if for no other reason than to be able to select better produce for themselves. 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.
- lucideer 10y ago
  While I very much appreciate the sentiment behind this post, I'm somewhat in disbelief at the anecdotes. What country are you living in? 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.
yuvadam 10y ago
"Reconnect with food"? How about we stop enslaving and exploiting animals for food? Or is that too radical of an idea?
- supercarrot 10y ago
  It's not radical. Given the fact that with 1 metric ton of soy I can produce several tons of soy milk that has better protein and micronutrient content than cow milk. Same can be done with peas. With 1 metric ton of soy, I can't even feed these 40 cows for two weeks. It's extremely inefficient system that I'm quite surprised the industry is still standing. Probably due to all tax incentives and brainwashing that cow milk is somehow necessary for human survival. edit: loving the downvotes, a bunch of butthurt first world tastebuds.
dogma1138 10y ago
Why? Anyone that been to the Netherlands would tell you they got enough cows on Land. 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...
- undersuit 10y ago
  Learning how to raise cattle on floating ocean platforms in a country with 2/3s of its land threatened by ocean flooding sounds like a solid plan.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Not really, raising cattle on the ocean is a very bad idea as far as the environment goes. 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.
timwaagh 10y ago
wow 2.5 million. rotterdam is among the poorer cities in the netherlands. they could have done a lot of other things with that money. like give a thousand people a job for a year. or expand the subway or the docks (its main economic engine).
- icebraining 10y ago
  A hundred people, not a thousand.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Bromskloss 10y ago
Doesn't that take away from the enjoyable water?

43 points by kawera 10y ago

Well, the degree to which costs would have to be scaled down can't be understated; 2.5 million euros for 40 cows. Yikes.

rmason 10y ago
Unless it doubles as a tourist attraction that charges admission the economics will not work.
randomdata 10y ago
Here I was thinking that it wasn't ridiculously out of line like some of these urban farming projects. Looking at the farms for sale in my area, there's a traditional land-based dairy farm in a rural area – with 50kg of quota (approximately 50 cows) – listed at $4M Canadian dollars, or just shy of €2.8M at the current exchange rate.
- krrrh 10y ago
  Thise numbers say a lot more about the need to reform Canada's supply management system for dairy production which is basically analogous to taxi medallions for dairy cows. It's why cheese and milk are roughly twice as expensive as in the US.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    The US isn't much better. The subsidies farmers get block more efficiently farmed dairy here in New Zealand and are a source of some frustration to NZ farmers.

mc32 10y ago

"My husband ... visited New York, there was Hurricane Sandy and he saw the shelves were empty; there was only food for two days. He thought we had to do things in another way, and the idea came: why not build a floating farm?” 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.

astrodust 10y ago
If they're anything like the casino barges in the Katrina wake, the answer is "No": http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4024377.html http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4024377.html 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.
- 13of40 10y ago
  Of all the things we could add to try and revitalize Seattle's waterfront, I'm not sure the pervasive smell of cow poop is the answer. We've got places like Duvall and Enumclaw for that.
masklinn 10y ago
> Would floating farms fare well in hurricanes? 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).
- cr1895 10y ago
  >however they could be moved out of the way of the hurricane and moved back afterwards. 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.

hexscrews 10y ago

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the technology to generate milk from artificial mammary glands becomes a thing. We are already on the path to eliminating the need for bovine meat processing.

stephenr 10y ago
> We are already on the path to eliminating the need for bovine meat processing. You might be. I'm not.

legulere 10y ago

This is another step in the wrong direction. Animals are very resource intensive and give almost no resources in return. 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.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
Historically horses were fed oats because oats were viewed as an inferior meal. But humans certainly can eat oats. 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.
- phillc73 10y ago
  > But humans certainly can eat oats. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_oats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_oats
ptaipale 10y ago
>This is another step in the wrong direction. Animals are very resource intensive and give almost no resources in return. 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.

masklinn 10y ago

I wonder how they're going to handle and get rid of manure, the render doesn't show anything for that, and you don't want to dump raw manure in the water.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
I'd expect it to be collected and sold? There's lots of demand for fertilizer.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  In the volume cows make it, demand would be satisfied fast. New Zealand's waterways aren't dead or dying while people want the run off. They are being destroyed because of the volume dairy farms produce so badly exceeds that which is easily used.
  - phillc73 10y ago
    I think this will probably be one of the biggest challenges for this project. Bovine excrement and odour are very briefly mentioned in the article, but not nearly in enough detail. 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.
tremon 10y ago
[..] a special membrane floor that lets bovine urine soak through. A machine will mop up dry cow dung [..] 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.

monk_e_boy 10y ago

A bit off topic: I watched a TV show, it was a competition for the best young chef. At one point they took the chefs out into the country side to cook somewhere, on the drive they got caught up in some sheep that were out in the road. All the chefs in the car looked around in amazement, one said, "This is where our meat comes from?"... I was just amazed. They had no idea how big a sheep is, or that it is a real live animal with feelings and a desire for food, shelter, comfort etc. 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.

brc 10y ago
I agree that people should be more connected to their food supply, even if for no other reason than to be able to select better produce for themselves. 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.
lucideer 10y ago
While I very much appreciate the sentiment behind this post, I'm somewhat in disbelief at the anecdotes. What country are you living in? 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.

yuvadam 10y ago

"Reconnect with food"? How about we stop enslaving and exploiting animals for food? Or is that too radical of an idea?

supercarrot 10y ago
It's not radical. Given the fact that with 1 metric ton of soy I can produce several tons of soy milk that has better protein and micronutrient content than cow milk. Same can be done with peas. With 1 metric ton of soy, I can't even feed these 40 cows for two weeks. It's extremely inefficient system that I'm quite surprised the industry is still standing. Probably due to all tax incentives and brainwashing that cow milk is somehow necessary for human survival. edit: loving the downvotes, a bunch of butthurt first world tastebuds.

dogma1138 10y ago

Why? Anyone that been to the Netherlands would tell you they got enough cows on Land. 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...

undersuit 10y ago
Learning how to raise cattle on floating ocean platforms in a country with 2/3s of its land threatened by ocean flooding sounds like a solid plan.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Not really, raising cattle on the ocean is a very bad idea as far as the environment goes. 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.

timwaagh 10y ago

wow 2.5 million. rotterdam is among the poorer cities in the netherlands. they could have done a lot of other things with that money. like give a thousand people a job for a year. or expand the subway or the docks (its main economic engine).

icebraining 10y ago
A hundred people, not a thousand.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Bromskloss 10y ago

Doesn't that take away from the enjoyable water?