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How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

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Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#71

Post by logicrook »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #65
logicrook wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree much. If you look outside of CS and mathematics, where FLOSS principles are widely represented, in most domains it is very hard to access the knowledge. Besides the experts protecting their expertise, there are some fields where they actively try to discourage any such dissemination of knowledge to protect the interest of the trade -medicine, where there is also a question of accountability- or to pr…

Medicine (and many other "closed" subjects) is widely taught in schools - it is not a secret guild. You can also go to school for agriculture, to learn about the growth of crops and about livestock management. The difference is that this ocean farming is a new endeavor by a small group. It's not like CS or math where independent researchers can download a compiler or pick up a notebook and verify or extend other stud…

>Medicine (and many other "closed" subjects) is widely taught in schools - it is not a secret guild.

We agree, but you could as well say thus that closed software is not really closed since you can learn software in schools. It's different from having easily accessible knowledge, when it's hard to get actual data on many subjects (in some cases, this data is even actually protected by law).

>It's not like CS or math where independent researchers can download a compiler or pick up a notebook and verify or extend other studies, you need years of work and large amounts of money.

It's not so much of a problem. There are enough people out there that are ready to test the ideas and techniques. If you could find say a set of various setups that worked for a set of given conditions (with a good description of costs, encountered issues and output) then you could have people who can test it by themselves while changing the parts they don't like, and contribute their own data. There's a huge amount of money spent on experimenting already, however it's basically all done in a closed manner.

BTW, if you have "the secret guild" feeling out of my comment, it's because discussing with my physician friends, they clearly advocated for some principles in this spirit (irrevocability of the physician's opinion, unilateral defense of their interests regardless of any moral issue, etc). It may vary depending on your country, of course.

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#72

Post by aurelianito »

facepalm wrote: post #40

It sounds good, but nothing is zero impact. If an area the size of Washington state could feed the planet, it would imply that the solar energy hitting an area of that size is sufficient to produce all the food the planet needs. It seems unlikely to me, but I admit I haven't done any calculations (I don't even know how big Washington State is). More likely, those farms use "free food" that comes their way via ocean c…

It seems to me that it uses as food the extra CO2 and Nitrogen that we are dumping into the sea. So the actual impact would be a better CO2 and Nitrogen balance!

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#73

Post by 13of40 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #63
goda90 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it'd require extra processing to make sure heavy metals aren't left in the ethanol or if the typical production methods already leave that stuff out.

Distillation should have no problem dealing with heavy metals. Other nasty things though are azeotropic with either water or ethanol and would have to be accounted for if you wanted to make drinkable vodka. Contaminants are less of a concern if you are looking to make fuel rather than booze.

I recall seeing some early biofuel powered busses that smelled like frenchfries because they used recycled deep fryer oil. I don't know how popular they'd be if they smelled like Bronx clam.

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#74

Post by datashovel »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #65
logicrook wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree much. If you look outside of CS and mathematics, where FLOSS principles are widely represented, in most domains it is very hard to access the knowledge. Besides the experts protecting their expertise, there are some fields where they actively try to discourage any such dissemination of knowledge to protect the interest of the trade -medicine, where there is also a question of accountability- or to pr…

Medicine (and many other "closed" subjects) is widely taught in schools - it is not a secret guild. You can also go to school for agriculture, to learn about the growth of crops and about livestock management. The difference is that this ocean farming is a new endeavor by a small group. It's not like CS or math where independent researchers can download a compiler or pick up a notebook and verify or extend other stud…

I could certainly see "pull requests" happening for collaboration on open documentation / manuals / reference guides, etc.

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#75

Post by 13of40 »

rukuu_001 wrote: post #26

Aqua-farming shellfish is the closest thing to free protein we're going to get. My folks are involved with farming mussels in New Zealand. The farms are in a river mouth, putting the nitrogen and phosphate runoff from farms to good use. The phytoplankton they eat is replenished 500m down-current from the mussels. There's one major risk - the 'spat' - the baby mussels used to start a vertical mussel line - are harvest…

I visited a farm in British Columbia about ten years ago that was raising bivalves (geoducks I think) and they'd worked out how to raise them all the way from fertilization through all the microscopic stages. In retrospect, they probably had to do that because clams aren't polite enough to attach to something, en masse, that you can collect on the beach.

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#76

Post by noir_lord »

facepalm wrote: post #40

It sounds good, but nothing is zero impact. If an area the size of Washington state could feed the planet, it would imply that the solar energy hitting an area of that size is sufficient to produce all the food the planet needs. It seems unlikely to me, but I admit I haven't done any calculations (I don't even know how big Washington State is). More likely, those farms use "free food" that comes their way via ocean c…

Washington State has an area of 184827 square kilometers.

247 acres to a square kilometer gives you 45652269 acres, article says 25 tonnes per acre, giving a yield of 1141306725 tons or about 160kg for every person on the planet.

This makes lots of assumptions but even if you half the efficiency you are in the ballpark of 80kg of nutritious plant matter per every person on the planet.

It would also work out at ~1600 shellfish per person on the planet.

Lots of assumptions but it's in the ballpark.

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#77

Post by beambot »

rukuu_001 wrote: post #26

Aqua-farming shellfish is the closest thing to free protein we're going to get. My folks are involved with farming mussels in New Zealand. The farms are in a river mouth, putting the nitrogen and phosphate runoff from farms to good use. The phytoplankton they eat is replenished 500m down-current from the mussels. There's one major risk - the 'spat' - the baby mussels used to start a vertical mussel line - are harvest…

Honest question: How does that scale up? At first guess, I'd imagine there's insufficient area in (non-polluted) river mouths to create a large enough sustainable supply for world-wide demand.

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#78

Post by thangalin »

adwn wrote: post #62
thangalin wrote: post #11

We should focus our attention on taking humans out of the food industry altogether. Here's a model I've been thinking about that should make it possible to create a free food society: http://i.stack.imgur.com/KfGtn.png Not just free as in no cost, but free also as in liberty. Imagine not having to work for food. Food weaves a recursive economic penalty into all facets of society. What's especially amazing about 3D ve…

> [...] fusion [...] free food [...] Fusion is by no means cheap. To quote myself from a different thread: Even if/when we get commercially viable fusion, there's no reason why it should be significantly cheaper than energy from nuclear fission – you'll still need extremely complicated, high-precision, high-technology machines, generators, cooling towers, buildings, skilled workers, some amount of regulation, and dis…

> there's no reason why it should be significantly cheaper than energy

According to Lockheed Martin, compact fusion has the potential to produce (modular?) 10MW reactors about the size of a semi-trailer truck. This reactor size reduction comes with a corresponding cost reduction without depending on new physics.

http://www.lockheedmartin.ca/us/products/compact-fusion.html

Note: I'm not a nuclear physicist.

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#79

Post by samstave »

jmknoll wrote: post #13
jacobolus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are many thousands of edible sea plants, maybe plants and shellfish local to the region could be used. Seems like you could potentially find places where the farms would do more good than harm, even ignoring the food production aspect: They claimed that the farms make good habitats for various types of marine life, serve as effective storm breaks, etc. I wonder if they might even be able to improve local oce…

The author begins to address one of your questions in the article, although I would like to see this subject treated in a little bit more depth. "Even the best land-based farms pollute, sending nitrogen into our waterways, so we use our kelp to capture that nitrogen, turn it into liquid fertilizers, and send it back to organic farmers to grow their wonderful vegetables. When the nitrogen then runs back into Long Isla…

What does the kelp grow on? Ropes? Or does it need to grow up from the sea bed?

Re: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

#80

Post by adwn »

thangalin wrote: post #78
adwn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] fusion [...] free food [...] Fusion is by no means cheap. To quote myself from a different thread: Even if/when we get commercially viable fusion, there's no reason why it should be significantly cheaper than energy from nuclear fission – you'll still need extremely complicated, high-precision, high-technology machines, generators, cooling towers, buildings, skilled workers, some amount of regulation, and dis…

> there's no reason why it should be significantly cheaper than energy According to Lockheed Martin, compact fusion has the potential to produce (modular?) 10MW reactors about the size of a semi-trailer truck. This reactor size reduction comes with a corresponding cost reduction without depending on new physics. http://www.lockheedmartin.ca/us/products/compact-fusion.html Note: I'm not a nuclear physicist.

Lockheed Martin has yet to produce any evidence that they have achieved break-even power under laboratory conditions, not to mention a device that scales to MW levels or delivers cheap energy.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

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