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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
[..] 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
>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.
> an array of dozens of unwieldly floating wind turbines
What wind turbines? The article is about actual farms on barges/floating platforms, not about windfarms. Sure you'd need a bunch of tugs to move them around and there's the question of power and whether you'd leave the cattle on during moving, but there's no seabed mooring involved or anything like that.
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.
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).
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.