Is it harvested right from the ocean? Do they need to build special aquariums? Sounds expensive to harvest to me, but I could be wrong. Maybe that's why beef is more easily accessable in Michigan than seaweed
Basically, for seaweed farming you have a very large net that you lay out under the water. The mesh is about 15 cm square. Then you let the seaweed grow right on the net. When there's enough, you just go out in your boat and haul the net and the seaweed in together.
It doesn't need to be warm to grow, but it may need to be salty. It is also a bad idea to build sea-retaining walls, as this allows plankton such as Red Tide to flourish which compete directly with the seaweed for food. That seems to have been the cause of this years' bad harvest.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
You can find this stuff growing in most salt marshes. It's an interesting plant. Like a cactus, it has to avoid dehydration (only due to a saline rather than an arid environment) so it evolved a fleshy, succulent body without leaves. It grows as a low shoot a 10-15 cm high with branches about 0.5cm thick in among the spartina grass in somewhat muddy, salty organic muck. At least that's what it's like up here in New England -- on the west coast where Spartina is an exotic there are probably different species of Salicornia have differnt growth habits.
If you want to try Salicornia for yourself, go for a walk in a nice salt marsh and look for a little green plant with no immediately visible leaves and fleshy green stalks that snap like a fresh deli pickle. It's edible, although sometimes it has a slightly marshy off-taste. If you pick it from a clean, well flushed location it has a mild, slightly briny taste. It's only a little salty -- it's innards couldn't be salty and survive. It's good in a salad, and I can see using it in salsa. Comparing it to asparagus as some peole do is a bit of a stretch though -- I doubt it will never be much of a human staple.
Even so my hat's off to this guy. I'd be willing to bet that 99% of the crops grown boil down to about twenty species and that no more than a few hundred out of the millions of plant species are used for human consumption. Think of what it would be like without corn, tomatoes, or potatoes -- all of which were unknown outside of the Americas until the 1500s and not widely used until the 1800s. There's a whole new world of plant species out there.
I also think this guy is also trying something a bit more ambitious than just cultivating salt tolerant plants. It sounds like he's trying to build the farm as a semi-closed ecological system rather than as an agricultural factory. In a factory model, you have your raw materials brought from elsewhere (water, seeds, fertilizer) and you have your waste materials (nutrient and pesticide laden runoff) taken away. In an ecological system every waste product of every subsystem is food for another subsystem. Of course regular farms work this way too, but they don't do so comprehensively. It might not be financially practical in the first world where labor costs are high and capital is available.
Ultimately if a farm were like an ecological system its outputs other than human consumables would circulate endlessly in a closed loop. Ultimately, if our human systems don't form closed loops on a global scale then we will have problems as we run out of places to put our waste and sources of materials. Closing the loop on a small scale would be particularly beneficial to developing countries who don't have the capital to shift these problems elsewhere.
-- Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Part of the problem with this guy's approach is that it hugs the coasts -- the most highly prized real estate in the world. Additionally, the coastal ecosystems are among the most valued -- without human "enhancement".
Agriculture can be removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.
On about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert, California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5 years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or "nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own acreage in conventional agricultural uses.
The late John Martin at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate (available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting) over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from "crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of 50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they terminated the fertilization and watched.
When they terminated the fertilization, the artificial ecosystem eventually disappeared.
The density of nutrients is important. If you have too much, the phytoplankton dies without being eaten by the zooplankton (or grazing fish) and rots, thereby removing oxygen from the water and suffocating the grazers and fish. Too little nutrient, and you have an ocean desert. There is a broad range of nutrient density where zooplankton and fish can swim from one meal to the next without starving -- and the abundant fish catches off of Peru are an example of what you get when you make it easy for fish to fatten up on phytoplankton grazers.
The ratio of Peru's fish production between normal (fertile) times to El Ninio is 1000.
The areas of ocean desert amenable to such fertilization vastly exceed those required to economically provide the entire world's population with a protein rich diet based on high quality sea food. An added benefit is that the phytoplankton growth captures CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby reducing global warming.
This option for humanity is no where more important than in Africa and the Amazon where populations that are well adapted for the tropics are currently threatening some of Earth's most valuable natural habitats with some of the most inefficient agricultural uses of land. Those who seek to save the tropics should take objective steps toward opening up this tropical oceanic frontier.
In conclusion: Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.
I already eat quite a bit of seaweed (both raw and procesed into higher level foods) and have often wondered why it isn't used more in foods. You can use the gummy nature of it's structure to bind other foodstuffs and so alleviate the need for eggs and dairy. Dairy and poultry farming is energy intensive as well as cruel and consumes freshwater. Growing cereals to feed them to cows is stupid in effeciency terms.
It's great to think that the environmental effect is positive too. I wonder what the downside is, there always is one somewhere.
Using the tanks is a cool sword into ploughshares scheme, I'll have to get one for my aquarium. .oO0Oo.
-- There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It looks like they have figured out how to handle the economics of the situation, etc. They even have a website called www.seawaterfarms.com of all things. It is the name of the company.
Here are some details, but there is much more in the original newspaper article and on their website:
In 1967, Hodges, then 30, looked ahead and started to worry about how the world could feed a rapidly growing population. Just 3 percent of all water is fresh, and only half of that is attainable. He established the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona that year and began looking for solutions. Desalination, he soon realized, might never be economically viable. That conclusion set him thinking in a new direction: Why not see what grows in saltwater? A practical answer to that question, some scientists have suggested, would mark a great step forward in human welfare. ''The single most important biological contributions to world peace will be to produce plants which grow effectively in quite salty water,'' the British mathematician Jacob Bronowski argued nearly half a century ago.
Salt accumulation, which has ruined farmers in the Aral Sea basin and California's Imperial Valley, isn't a problem. The plain and underground water table are already salty, and the constant flushing of irrigation, Hodges says, ensures that the fields won't exceed the salinity of the water. Nutrients from the effluent, meanwhile, do build up, improving soil fertility over time.
He has got a whole biological cycle figured out.
-- "It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This could be an incredible opportunity for third-world nations. Although a lot of research has gone into the planning, I didn't see anything in the article that implied that it couldn't be implemented in low-tech environments. It should also be easy for poor countries to secure loans for food production projects.
It could also be applied to landlocked nations that have large brackish marshes. It would mean more study, but there are plenty of flora and fauna species that thrive in semi-salty water.
Perhaps oil-rich middle east countries can afford to pump large quantities of seawater to low areas (possibly as far as landlocked oil-poor african nations?).
This will be very interesting and exciting to follow.
Planting a mangrove farm sounds like a neat idea. The problem is, mangroves tend to trap sediment that's being transported in the longshore current. This can cause erosion problems later on down the line, since the amount of sediment in the current stays roughly constant, so the current picks up material from other places, causing the shoreline to retreat.
Seawater Farms seems to have picked a good location for their project-- I don't think there's a lot of current activity in the Red Sea. But this project would cause big problems elsewhere-- for instance, California or Florida, where they are already having problems with shoreline erosion.
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In fact, you might have heard that this year we had an especially bad seaweed harvest in the Ariake Sea, which is not 10 kilometers from my house.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Basically, for seaweed farming you have a very large net that you lay out under the water. The mesh is about 15 cm square. Then you let the seaweed grow right on the net. When there's enough, you just go out in your boat and haul the net and the seaweed in together.
It doesn't need to be warm to grow, but it may need to be salty. It is also a bad idea to build sea-retaining walls, as this allows plankton such as Red Tide to flourish which compete directly with the seaweed for food. That seems to have been the cause of this years' bad harvest.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
You can find this stuff growing in most salt marshes. It's an interesting plant. Like a cactus, it has to avoid dehydration (only due to a saline rather than an arid environment) so it evolved a fleshy, succulent body without leaves. It grows as a low shoot a 10-15 cm high with branches about 0.5cm thick in among the spartina grass in somewhat muddy, salty organic muck. At least that's what it's like up here in New England -- on the west coast where Spartina is an exotic there are probably different species of Salicornia have differnt growth habits.
If you want to try Salicornia for yourself, go for a walk in a nice salt marsh and look for a little green plant with no immediately visible leaves and fleshy green stalks that snap like a fresh deli pickle. It's edible, although sometimes it has a slightly marshy off-taste. If you pick it from a clean, well flushed location it has a mild, slightly briny taste. It's only a little salty -- it's innards couldn't be salty and survive. It's good in a salad, and I can see using it in salsa. Comparing it to asparagus as some peole do is a bit of a stretch though -- I doubt it will never be much of a human staple.
Even so my hat's off to this guy. I'd be willing to bet that 99% of the crops grown boil down to about twenty species and that no more than a few hundred out of the millions of plant species are used for human consumption. Think of what it would be like without corn, tomatoes, or potatoes -- all of which were unknown outside of the Americas until the 1500s and not widely used until the 1800s. There's a whole new world of plant species out there.
I also think this guy is also trying something a bit more ambitious than just cultivating salt tolerant plants. It sounds like he's trying to build the farm as a semi-closed ecological system rather than as an agricultural factory. In a factory model, you have your raw materials brought from elsewhere (water, seeds, fertilizer) and you have your waste materials (nutrient and pesticide laden runoff) taken away. In an ecological system every waste product of every subsystem is food for another subsystem. Of course regular farms work this way too, but they don't do so comprehensively. It might not be financially practical in the first world where labor costs are high and capital is available.
Ultimately if a farm were like an ecological system its outputs other than human consumables would circulate endlessly in a closed loop. Ultimately, if our human systems don't form closed loops on a global scale then we will have problems as we run out of places to put our waste and sources of materials. Closing the loop on a small scale would be particularly beneficial to developing countries who don't have the capital to shift these problems elsewhere.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Agriculture can be removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.
On about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert, California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5 years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or "nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own acreage in conventional agricultural uses.
The late John Martin at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate (available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting) over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from "crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of 50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they terminated the fertilization and watched.
When they terminated the fertilization, the artificial ecosystem eventually disappeared.
The density of nutrients is important. If you have too much, the phytoplankton dies without being eaten by the zooplankton (or grazing fish) and rots, thereby removing oxygen from the water and suffocating the grazers and fish. Too little nutrient, and you have an ocean desert. There is a broad range of nutrient density where zooplankton and fish can swim from one meal to the next without starving -- and the abundant fish catches off of Peru are an example of what you get when you make it easy for fish to fatten up on phytoplankton grazers.
The ratio of Peru's fish production between normal (fertile) times to El Ninio is 1000.
The areas of ocean desert amenable to such fertilization vastly exceed those required to economically provide the entire world's population with a protein rich diet based on high quality sea food. An added benefit is that the phytoplankton growth captures CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby reducing global warming.
This option for humanity is no where more important than in Africa and the Amazon where populations that are well adapted for the tropics are currently threatening some of Earth's most valuable natural habitats with some of the most inefficient agricultural uses of land. Those who seek to save the tropics should take objective steps toward opening up this tropical oceanic frontier.
In conclusion: Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.
Seastead this.
I already eat quite a bit of seaweed (both raw and procesed into higher level foods) and have often wondered why it isn't used more in foods. You can use the gummy nature of it's structure to bind other foodstuffs and so alleviate the need for eggs and dairy. Dairy and poultry farming is energy intensive as well as cruel and consumes freshwater. Growing cereals to feed them to cows is stupid in effeciency terms.
.oO0Oo.
It's great to think that the environmental effect is positive too. I wonder what the downside is, there always is one somewhere.
Using the tanks is a cool sword into ploughshares scheme, I'll have to get one for my aquarium.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Here are some details, but there is much more in the original newspaper article and on their website:
In 1967, Hodges, then 30, looked ahead and started to worry about how the world could feed a rapidly growing population. Just 3 percent of all water is fresh, and only half of that is attainable. He established the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona that year and began looking for solutions. Desalination, he soon realized, might never be economically viable. That conclusion set him thinking in a new direction: Why not see what grows in saltwater? A practical answer to that question, some scientists have suggested, would mark a great step forward in human welfare. ''The single most important biological contributions to world peace will be to produce plants which grow effectively in quite salty water,'' the British mathematician Jacob Bronowski argued nearly half a century ago.
Salt accumulation, which has ruined farmers in the Aral Sea basin and California's Imperial Valley, isn't a problem. The plain and underground water table are already salty, and the constant flushing of irrigation, Hodges says, ensures that the fields won't exceed the salinity of the water. Nutrients from the effluent, meanwhile, do build up, improving soil fertility over time.
He has got a whole biological cycle figured out.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It could also be applied to landlocked nations that have large brackish marshes. It would mean more study, but there are plenty of flora and fauna species that thrive in semi-salty water.
Perhaps oil-rich middle east countries can afford to pump large quantities of seawater to low areas (possibly as far as landlocked oil-poor african nations?).
This will be very interesting and exciting to follow.
Planting a mangrove farm sounds like a neat idea. The problem is, mangroves tend to trap sediment that's being transported in the longshore current. This can cause erosion problems later on down the line, since the amount of sediment in the current stays roughly constant, so the current picks up material from other places, causing the shoreline to retreat.
Seawater Farms seems to have picked a good location for their project-- I don't think there's a lot of current activity in the Red Sea. But this project would cause big problems elsewhere-- for instance, California or Florida, where they are already having problems with shoreline erosion.
For more info and links about coastal erosion, try http://www.haznet.org/text/erosion.html.