4 ms·

Maybe they should bring the crops to the sea rather than bring the sea to the crops.

• lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I've been wondering abut the viability of farming in floating polytunnels. They could even be temporarily submersible to weather storms.
  • bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    How would a polytunnel be submersible? A poly tunnel is a really flimsy structure. Just going down 10 meters double the pressure (1 bar), and being any shallower isn't going to protect you from the surface water churn. Not to talk about the effort to push thousands of cubic meters of air under water. Not very practical I don't think. :)
    • lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Polytunnels are flimsy in compression, but clear plastic can be very good in tension and can contain a bar or so of pressure fairly easily, so it may be feasible. It was only one of the solutions I thought of for coping with storms if you are growing out at sea. The other two are either being able to reel them back onto land, or just making them short and tough, so they can just roll over the waves. The buoyancy problem isn't that difficult though as you can have counter-buoyancy that rises when they sink.
      • bjelkeman-again 12y ago
        Building a submarine out of a polytunnel just isn't going to work. There are so many better ways to spend money. There are literally many thousands of km of dessert coastline where we can build greenhouses and grow vegetables where nothing else can grow. See my other entries in this thread.