by ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) – On the top deck of a three-tiered structure near downtown Rotterdam, brown and white cows graze on pasture that has fallen from a conveyor belt overhead and the rinds of salvaged oranges from supermarket juice machines in the port city. . Overhead canopies protect the cows from the sun and collect rainwater that they will eventually drink.
Sometimes the cows of Maas-Rijn-Ijssel – named after three Dutch rivers – go over to a machine that milks them automatically, or wander out of the way of a robot that surpasses the past to clean up manure that will become organic fertilizer.
“Our cows are what they call upcycling women,” says Minke van Wingerden of Ferim Snámh, who sells the milk, cheese and buttermilk produced by the cows in a small shop on dry land near the port.
The Floating Farm, which has been operating since 2019 and is billed as the first of its kind in the world, is not on entirely new terrain. Attempts to plant agriculture on or in water are as old as the Aztecs, who built artificial islands to grow food long ago in what is now Mexico.
But it’s an idea that’s gaining new attention as a way to tackle food security and the challenges of climate change. And it doesn’t have to be as sophisticated as the Dutch farm, which came about after Van Wingerden’s husband, Peter, experienced the food shortages that hit New York after Hurricane Sandy hit the city in 2012.
In the coastal and low-lying areas of India and Bangladesh, an NGO is reviving a traditional practice of creating floating rafts that can hold seedlings above monsoon floodwaters that can drown crops.
Kolkata-based South Asia Forum for Environment has made several technological improvements in “climate-resilient floating farming”. The bamboo rafts are built larger and heavier to better withstand storms. Plastic cover and shade nets protect vulnerable plants, while solar-powered pumps collect rainwater to irrigate the seedlings. And the organization is partnering with local research institutes to provide farmers with the best possible climate-resilient seeds, and to pass on knowledge about pest control. Communications director Amrita Chatterjee said it can be more urgent when pests multiply in very hot weather, such as this summer, when temperatures reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) in some places.
Chatterjee said the rafts are not “typical farming” and it takes patience to get used to them. But in a few years they have more than doubled, to 500, the number of floating farms operating in different villages. Vegetables such as medicinal plants, spinach and chilies are among the items cultivated on the floating platforms, and farmers can also raise crabs to be fattened for market in floating boxes.
“Slowly, everyone is interested,” Chatterjee said.
With the increasingly erratic monsoons, the rafts have helped with food security, Chatterjee said. They were also helpful when the Indian state of West Bengal was hit with a one-two punch of a cyclone and subsequent COVID-19 in 2020, she said.
Farmers using the rafts are now feeding themselves and selling a little surplus in local markets, Chatterjee said. Her group hopes the idea can be scaled up to make it much more commercially viable.
It’s clear that floating farms will be scalable in the coming years in Southeast Asia, but educating the technology could be an obstacle to its adoption in some places, said Craig Jenkins, professor of sociology of academia at State University Ohio.
Back in Rotterdam, the owners of the Floating Farm cite several reasons for putting farms on water. That includes urbanization putting more people in cities, making it wise to bring food sources closer to them. They say the extreme weather spurred by climate change — heavy rains and flooding of cities and farmland — makes their climate-adapted approach to feeding those cities impossible.
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 flooded or storm-prone areas, he said. That could make it 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 is an interesting demonstration,” he said. “It would be hard for me to see it as a scalable project.”
Scaling up and significantly increasing the sustainability of urban food systems of floating farms is a challenge as in vertical farms, said Daniel Petrovics, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Amsterdam who has studied the scaling of several climate interventions, with includes i. the energy and agriculture sectors.
“You should think about things like, what is the local diet, what do people eat? Is this affecting that? What kind of stakeholders benefit from it?” he said. “Is it helping to alleviate food poverty in a city or is it some kind of gimmick coming from, say, a corporation looking for a return on investment?”
The owners of the Dutch floating farm are already moving to expand beyond their cows.
They plan to add a second floating farm in the same bay for vertical agriculture — 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 agriculture on water as a viable answer to flooding 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’re climate-adapted,” 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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