Tag: agriculture

East of Edenworks

The Edenworks fish and greens ecosystem farm in Brooklyn uses broad-spectrum LED lighting for continuous production indoors, all year long. The microgreens are in floating aquaponic containers, fertilized by the microbially-digested fish waste from below, and they thrive on this nutrient stream. Results: the greens and fish are quite yummy and popular at the local Whole Foods.

  • 90% of American seafood is imported and 40% is mislabeled (!)
  • Fish are 40x more efficient than cows at converting feed to body mass
  • Over 50% of all fish meals come from aquaculture ($160B globally)
  • Edenworks’ aquaponic microbiome improves conversion of nitrogen to plant yield by 18x over indoor hydroponics

Soil Microbiome

Bruns is using high-throughput sequencing, among other tools, to tease apart this “DNA soup” that is contained within soil. Her research on nitrogen-cycling microbes at the field scale fits into the bigger picture of reducing nutrient transport to coastal dead zones. “Overall, 50% of the nitrogen in fertilizer that’s applied to crops is not taken up by the crops. Instead it leaches to the groundwater or runs off in sediment. Much of that nitrogen eventually makes its way into the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay, where it upsets ecosystems. I’m interested in how we can stop this process at the source, how we can make our nitrogen application and management methods less wasteful.”

Swale

We’ve been tracking the movements of Swale, a forage-ready floating food forest around the New York City waterfront, for the last few years from the Bronx to Brooklyn Bridge Park and Governors Island. This year, Swale will dock from May to June at the Brooklyn Army Terminal and open on the weekends.

Heirloom Beans

Then 1 day, in 2003, Thomas Keller came by. His restaurant, the French Laundry, which would later earn 3 Michelin stars, happened to be in Yountville. “I remember, he had probably 10 different beans on the table. To get something that freshly dried was a revelation.” The bean that caught Keller’s eye was a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover. Called the Vallarta, it was on the verge of extinction when Sando found it, but it had a dense, fudgy texture and gave a good broth. “Steve had taken something that used to be just a dried bean and raised it to a new level, where the flavor was really intense and it cooked so much more consistently”. Within 1 month, it was a staple of the French Laundry. Within 1 year, every chef in California seemed to be serving beans.

2022-03-10: A huge bean collection

We have 36k different types of bean collected. Every single one has a story to tell and could be the solution to so many of our planetary challenges out there. Many of these beans have been collected over the last hundred years from around the world. And what’s really fascinating is most of these beans have never been characterized. The researchers don’t know how these beans grow what they look like, what environments they would thrive in. So, we’ve partnered with them to use our technology to understand those beans’ capabilities for the first time. It took us 30 years to produce a drought-tolerant bean where we found the trait for drought tolerance in one of these beans in the collection. With the technology of Mineral, we can move into absolute precision in finding these types of traits much quicker, much cheaper and much more efficiently.

Biggest Field Experiment

A total of 13123 site years of field trials were conducted from 2005 to 2015 for the 3 crops (n=6089 for maize, 3300 for rice and 3734 for wheat), with sites spread across all agro-ecological zones. Each field trial included 2 types of management: conventional farmers’ practice (control) and ISSM-based recommendations (treatment; developed specifically for a given area). The recommended practices were discussed with local experts and participating farmers. Adjustments were made when necessary. Finally, the agreed-upon management technologies were implemented in the fields by the farmer; the collaborators provided guidance on-site during key operations, such as sowing, fertilization, irrigation and harvest. Campaign collaborators recorded fertilizer rate, pesticide and energy use, and calculated nutrient application rate. At maturity, grain yield and above ground biomass were sampled by the collaborators for plots with a size of 6m^2 for wheat and rice, and 10m^2 for maize. Plant samples were dried at 70 °C in a forced-draft oven to constant weight, and grain yield was standardized at 14% moisture for all crops.

Dutch Agriculture

The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country. It’s bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it’s the globe’s number 2 exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270x its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it? That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. 20 years ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry “2x as much food using 50% as many resources.” Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by 90 %. They’ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by 60%.

The way in which the Netherlands uses architecture to feed the world is best seen from above. Dutch agriculture is defined by vast landscapes of greenhouses which dominate the architectural landscape of South Holland. In total, the country contains greenhouses in an area 56% larger than the island of Manhattan.

2019-10-12:

1 proposition for the future of the countryside can be found in the Netherlands. On the Hook of Holland, a vast sea of greenhouses surrounds vernacular Dutch farmhouses, alive with high-tech, innovative food production. Despite its small size, and dense population, the Netherlands is the world’s second-largest exporter of food. Such an accreditation would not be possible using conventional farming methods. But the Dutch countryside is far from conventional. In place of plowed furrows and green grazing fields, there are extraordinary greenhouse complexes with climate-controlled farms, some spanning over 1 km2.

2022-05-09:

Over the past 60 years, greenhouse production has been focused on yield. If you compare a field in Spain with greenhouses in the Netherlands, we are more sustainable because we are using agricultural land more optimally. If you want the same yield in Spain, you need 20x as much land. But the best part of the story is because we grow under controlled conditions, we can use biological controls. There are hardly any pesticides used in greenhouse production, but it’s also more efficient with water. The 80 kilograms per meter in the Netherlands is achieved with 4x less water than the 4 kilograms of tomatoes in Spain.

but there’s a claim hydroponics don’t “taste” good:

Soil is fundamental for preserving an ecosystem, and for delivering flavor and nutrition. There is a lot of complex biology in soil, including fungal and bacterial networks, which enable the plant to absorb these micronutrients. When you farm hydroponically, it’s a very inert environment where you are growing from a substrate and you’re adding 5 inputs. It’s very hard, almost impossible, to argue that a plant grown in a hydroponic environment has access to the same nutrition as a plant grown in healthy soils.

Insect extinction

This won’t be good for the food chain

The Krefeld Entomological Society has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by 80%. Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved 1000s of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across 10 other sites.

2019-02-11: Insects are going extinct 8x faster than other animals

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind”. The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is shocking: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will 25% less, in 50 years 50% left and in 100 years you will have 0.” A rethinking of current agricultural practices, in particular a serious reduction in pesticide usage and its substitution with more sustainable, ecologically-based practices, is urgently needed to slow or reverse current trends, allow the recovery of declining insect populations and safeguard the vital ecosystem services they provide. In addition, effective remediation technologies should be applied to clean polluted waters in both agricultural and urban environments.