Farm Ship

Oceans cover some 75% of the earth's surface. Most of the oceans are, in biological terms, a vast desert. The nutrition for plant growth to start off the biological cycles has for the most part sunk to the bottom. Near the shores, though the opposite problem happens, as farm runoff arrives in the ocean, triggering a vast bloom of algae, which quickly turns into a suffocating oxygenless muck. The sun shines upon the ocean making rain, some of which powers the land-based photosynthesis with water, but most of which falls back into the ocean again. The availability of sun and water suddenly gave me an interesting idea. We take a discarded cargo ship, and convert the large surface area to a vast farm. Equipment is installed beneath the ship to suck up water and desalinate it, and have it bubble up beneath the dirt at the surface. The ship sails around the world, slowly growing tons and tons of food. Periodically the ship arrives at harbors where food prices are highest to sell the food, buy fertilizer, and change crews. (The laboring farmers would be mostly employees, and this system could hopefully offer some nice wages, enough for a plane ride back home every so often.)

If there's any runoff from this, there would be a temporary bloom running behind the ship's wake, but not severe enough to cause any sort of red tide or harmful eutrophication, and this causes a temporary fish spawning point. The benefits of ocean feeding occur provided the ship remains in motion at all times.

In addition, the ship could remain in constant spring or summer by constantly sailing back and forth between the northern and southern hemispheres, maintaining beneficial conditions for the crops at all times.

This would take on the large scale a considerable amount of energy. For best results, this should be done after fusion power is available, which would allow for the boat to operate pollution free. In practice, though, the boats would probably be coal fired, or diesel driven, with all the problems that attend that.

For feeding an increasingly hungry world, this might make at least a small difference.

Electric Bees

About 75% of our crops today rely on insect-based pollination.   We typically use bees for this purpose.  Bees drink nectar from the plant's flowers, getting pollen all over themselves in the process.  The pollen then fertilizes the plants, which then produce the fruit and seeds that we eat.  Everyone wins.
Except that bee colonies are in trouble.  We're not sure why, but something is killing off all the bee hives.  Some think that it is a disease not yet identified, other think that it is stray insecticidal chemicals from farms.   In any case, without bees, no fruit.
Many of these plants can be manually pollinated with a cotton swab, but that's a waste of human labor.  So instead, I think we should make robot bees.   These would fly around getting and injecting pollen, and occasionally returning to the hive for a recharge.   These robots would be immune to all diseases and chemicals, but unfortunately would not make honey.

Hormone Cleanup

Earlier this week, I pointed out that human activity has been putting hormone-like chemicals into the water. Don't panic. Discovery news has a solution.
Alfalfa and similar grasses absorbs this pollution, and is not often eaten by humans. Rabbits breed fast enough that we could have a disposable batch of rabbits to eat this, live their short lives, and produce pelts when they end. Running it through the alfalfa partially breaks it down, and feeding that alfalfa to rabbits will break it totally down. In theory, the rabbits would be safe to eat. (In practice though, I think they will wind up as dog or cat food.)
And if water treatment plants need to include a small alfalfa farm, I think they could do this. Water would be so much cleaner, for very little added cost.

Lake Gas Control

There are three lakes in Africa with a major problem. Their names are Nyos, Monoun, and Kivu. Volcanic activity beneath these lakes cranks them full of carbon dioxide, which builds to ludicrious pressure. This changes them, over time, from an ordinary lake into a can of violently shaken soda. At some point, a trigger sets them off into a huge explosion of water and carbon dioxide, which floods everything nearby and suffocates all animal life to death in a massive cloud of CO2.
French environmental scientists have installed a solution in Nyos in which they deliberately set off the eruption...inside a tiny pipe. This small eruption is cleaned up by local trees before any human sees it, and effectively is a self-perpetuating fountain. The lake's own CO2 shoves the water up the pipe, over and over and over, and this usage makes it impossible to build up to explosive levels. The villagers that live nearby can sleep peacefully.
Now, this fountain is pretty, but it's pretty sane science. Also, it is reported that to truly prevent eruption, we need five more of them. Maybe ten. So, I have a much much crazier solution.
We deliberately eutrophize the lake by adding iron and phosphorus, and extract the resulting plants for fertilizer and/or animal feed. Oxygen tends to bubble out of the lake rather than build up until it explodes, and the resulting muck is economically useful. This would be a continuously available resource, as we can recycle the phosphorous and iron from cheap sources. In phosphorous's case, sewage. Iron can be taken from rusted machinery beyond its useful life. This also sinks a large amount of carbon into animal life. Namely, whatever animals survive long enough to consume the algae. They may have to be manually reintroduced -- the natural state of the lake probably killed off any naturally present animals with carbonic acid.
On the downside, I think that much algae together may smell strange.

More News On Ocean Feeding

An experiment about ocean feeding, as a way of cutting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, is at the same time both failed and successful. (In the movie sense. In the real science sense, any significant result is a success, the only failure would be an ambiguous result or an obviously tampered with result.)
The experiment suggests its a failure, because the resulting bloom did not sink to the ocean. Instead, it was eaten by small prawns. The carbon will not be locked away at the ocean bottom. Instead, it will become food, and the food of food, and generally enrich the life of the ocean. Arguably this is a big success, because this solves both the global warming and fish stock depletion problems in a single stroke. All our carbon problems will be turned into fish, which we promptly eat.
Now, if you wanted the carbon to sink, like this group wanted, apparently what you need is hydrosilicic acid, common in polar waters and rare in the tropics. This material is essential for diatomes to build their cell walls. And unfortunately, chemical production of silcic acids are not carbon neutral, so back to the drawing board.
Unless you can figure out some way to reshape the ocean's currents.....

Air Scrubbing Farms

It's been brought to my attention that in Nigeria, cocoa is a very popular crop, lead-based gasoline additives are super popular, and cocoa has an unfortunate tendency to extract lead from the air and incorporate it into itself. The bad side of this is that Nigerian-grown chocolate is contaminated with lead. The good news is that I can use this to clean the air.
Cocoa isn't alone. Different kinds of plants take different chemicals out of the air. As an example, there's a type of daisy that extracts benzene from the air. If we plant these in the right combinations, we have perfectly clean air, no matter how much pollution nearby industries spew into it. You wouldn't want to eat the products of these plants, so we're not going to. Instead, we're going to chemically extract the pollution, much of which is industrially useful. Wait, what?
Lead, in air or paint, is a pollution, which mostly serves to give people who absorb it brain damage. But lead in a car battery is what gives it its range, and lead in a denistry apron is what makes it absorb radiation. Lead is mined in tons and tons a year, even though it only sells for 2 cents a pound. (The extraction process is cheap enough that even at that low price, a lead mine makes millions of dollars for its owners.)
Likewise, many other common pollution particles have a high industrial value. Benzene is useful as a solvent. A portion of smog is actually gasoline that managed to escape combustion. Formaldehyde, a common VOC, is useful in the paper and textile industries. (it's a precursor chemical there. The final chemical bears little resemblance.)
After the extraction is done, we'll be left with a wet slurry of plant goo. We can throw this away. Or we could grow pretty flowers in it. You know, whichever.

Automated Mushroom Care

Cultivated mushrooms actually need a lot of attention. They grow best when the humidity is just so and the temperature is just right. So mushroom farmers have to spend a lot of time measuring and adjusting.
Hack a day brings my attention to one guy who automated the entire process. Computer sensors monitor the mushroom's environment, and turn on or off heaters, humidifiers, air pumps, and vents, to make the mushroom's growing environment exactly perfect. The mushroom farmer need only plant the mushrooms, and harvest them when they're ready to go.
I'm hoping this means more and cheaper mushrooms on the market, since no part of this is particularly expensive, and saves loads and loads of time and effort....

Growing in the Dark

Discovery News is reporting that an Arizona-area company is now growing crops in the most impractical space I can think of: the inside of a dark shipping container.
Why, you ask? Well, for one, the controlled environment severely cuts the need for water, allows the plants to grow in a sterile environment to cut down on food-based pathogens, and is totally immune to all crop-pests, who cannot get into the container. Losses will drop well below .1%.
This is also idea for the deep future, as this could work in space, or deep underground. Yes, we have enough lit space on the surface for the moment. But if our population keeps growing, we will run out of this, and have to either convert more of nature into farms, use these grow-containers underground, or have a massive war over the ever-decreasing available turf. None are terribly appealing options, and this container option has the advantage of merely being somewhat expensive.
The containers have hookups for water and electricity, and can be programmed to light when electricity is cheapest to save money. Plants have a cycle for growing, one of which needs light to energize the plant, the other in which it doesn't matter if there is light or not. Plants developed this cycle due to the day/night cycle of the earth where they evolved.

Fish Garden

We humans are pretty famous for our workings with plants. We purposefully grow them in farms and gardens for food, decoration, raw material, and so on. The plants depend on us, and we depend on the plants. Until now, we assumed this to be very rare, done by only us and leaf-cutter ants.
Discovery news is reporting that one species of fish, the Damselfish, grows intricate gardens of algae for personal consumption. It cultivates the algae, consumes algae that grows beyond a certain height, the way that a human would mow a lawn, and weeds out unwanted species, discarding them outside the garden. More unusually, different fish show different patterns of growth, with some tolerating several species of algae, but others demanding a monoculture of their favorite. Almost as if they had individual personalities with strong or weak preferences. The fish also tended to compete for the best sites, but could be persuaded to quit a claim if it were too hotly disputed.
A biology study on the fish's digestive system showed that the algae that they threw away as weeds tended to be higher in fiber, which apparently the fish had trouble digesting. The preferred algae species tended to be very digestable by the fish.

Farming our way out of trouble

Discovery news reports that one thing we're doing is indeed slowing global warming, and saving the economy, at the same time? What? Farming.
Apparently the gains in modern agriculture have been sucking tons and tons of carbon into the form of food, human beings, and animals. Still more farm produce becomes clothing, manufacturing materials, carpets, and other goods. All of which are voraciously consumed by people and industry, and the carbon that went into them stays out of the air for a very long time. (Well, for clothing and carpets, anyway. Food gets eaten and metabolized on a pretty short order.)
Another reason for the gains is that in the old days, farmers would produce more crops by acquiring more land. And if that land were a forest, it would be burned down. Today, farmers put chemical fertilizers and don't bother with the forest. The unburned forest keeps its carbon as trees. The farmer saves money (fertilizer costs less than forest, and the denser crops means less work and walking on the farmer's part), the forest isn't destroyed, everyone wins.

Amish Irony

When people think of the Amish, a small religious group common in the northeastern United States, what do you think of? Avoidance of technology, beards, farming, honesty, right? You probably don't think "marine pollution."
But Discovery News is reporting that farming in the Chesapeake bay area of Maryland and Virginia is polluting the bay, and that a considerable portion of the pollution comes from Amish farmers, basically for the same reason that technocratic farmers pollute: mismanagement of fertilizer.
Amish farmers may eschew chemical fertilizers, but they use an old-fashioned version of the same: horse manure. The manure contains the nitrogen and phosphorus that the crops need, but if over-applied, these same chemicals leach into the water, leading to harmful algae blooms. In ocean environments, these blooms lead to dead fish and very unhappy fishermen (who can no longer obtain enough fish to pay their bills).
Most Amish farmers dislike outsiders, especially ones from the government. Thankfully, a three-way chain of trust has been developed between a local charity, the EPA, and farmers, for the best possible result. The charity gets government funding, and in turn provides useful advice to farmers to both prevent pollution and improve their own health, and the farmers get help from people they can trust.
The Chesapeake needs all the help it can get, because if the gulf oil spill isn't contained soon, oil will start to seep in its direction, making things even worse. The region's fabled crab industry would go straight down the toilet in that case.

Cotton Cleanup

Large animal farms often pollute the area around them in a very ironic way -- they overfill the land with plant-nutrients. The trees turn neon green and the excess leeches into the waterways, causing algal blooms and bad smells.
On the other hand, some crops, particularly Cotton and Tobacco, have been particularly famous through farming history for needing quite a lot of these resources. I think we can use one to solve the other.
In an abandoned animal farm, grow quite a lot of Nitrogen-needy plants. They will absorb the pollution. Do not make cigarettes/textiles out of them, as they're probably infected with all kinds of heavy metals and bacteria to be trusted near humans. The crops can be chemically separated into any useful components.
Nearby trees should indicate the nitrogen-balance of the soil. When their leaves change from an unhealthy-looking neon-green to a lush summer-green, this indicates that the soil is now ready for conventional agriculture. Before that, the soil should test free of heavy-metal contaminants (which we will test for chemically), and then we can turn the farm over to a farmer of some kind.

Birds Don't Like Organic

Technical news site Ars Technica reports today that a controlled study of songbirds strongly prefer conventionally farmed seeds over organic ones.
Ars Technica notes that the conventionally farmed seeds had more protein, due to Haber-processed ammonia providing more nitrogen to the crop, while the organic ones had to get their own nitrogen from the soil. So it may be the case that what the birds are preferring is the higher protein quality, a major concern for a wild animal. (A good source of protein helps you heal injuries, keep your body in peak condition, and also make more of you. All things that animals want to do.)
Organic advocates shouldn't be insulted by this announcement, then. We humans have protein in pretty much unlimited quantities, so it makes sense for us to be a little picky about what we eat.

The Snake Road

Discovery News reports that snakes in the southwestern United States have a major problem: They refuse to cross roads and are becoming severely inbred as a result of this.
Rattlesnakes are a common species in the southwest, being a brown snake that eats rats, mice, and opossums, and having a collection of dried skin at the end of their tail that makes a rattling noise when shaken, hence the name. They shake their tails when they feel mildly threatened as a warning, and if that doesn't work, they have a poisonous bite. Hikers in the southwest are instructed not to provoke them, as they don't bite arbitrarily.
When more severely threatened, by loud noise or severe vibration, they lay perfectly still and hope that their camouflage will leave them undetected. This works great when hiding in the grass and the threat is a screaming hawk. This works less great on an asphalt road when the threat is a large car. The car's drivers typically never even sees the snake, and the snake's life ends with a loud thump that the driver can't tell apart from hitting a rock.
As a result, the surviving snakes have come to the conclusion that road equals squishy death, and refuse to cross them. The result of this and expanding roads have meant that snakes live in the little pockets between them and do not cross the road for any reason. Snakes will not mate with a snake a mere 500 meters away due to a road between them, and have gotten very incestuous as a result.
I know most people will just shrug. "Who cares about snakes?" To which I respond, "You like eating, don't you?" Snakes are the main rodent-control of the southwest, eating the vermin that would otherwise threaten crops. If they become too inept or sickly to eat these mice, then local farmers will need to invest in an expensive series of rodent-controls.
Discovery's biology department proposes that roads be built with periodic bridges, as snakes are perfectly willing to travel under a bridge.

Lightning Mushrooms

Japanese farmers have long believed that lightning strikes are great for mushroom farming. They said it made the mushrooms multiply. The world scoffed dismissively and went back to what they were doing.
And yet, a recent study shows that this is actually correct. A very short burst of extremely high voltage electricity improved yields by 80%.
This is of interest to mushroom farmers, who can inexpensively boost yields (since the burst need not be high amperage), and mushroom eaters, who can expect cheaper and more abundant mushrooms in the future. More mushrooms on my pizza, please.

Farming Afar via Game

In both the US and China, farming simulators are increasingly popular. Possibly in other countries too, I just haven't heard news reports about it. Such games involve pretending to farm by digging plots in a big grid, click for seed, click for water, click for harvest, and so on. It gives me an idea.
The games are popular because of their abstraction. What if there was a robot, able to do those various mundane tasks, with a supply of seeds and the ability to gather and distribute water? It would scan its environment, and report it to a game interface. People playing the game would indicate to "dig" various plots, water them, and which seeds to plant. The robot would receive instructions from the game, dig, water, and plant at the coordinates.
Each day it would report back to the game about the conditions. When the seeds sprouted, ground moisture and chemistry (reported as percentages of USDA recommended, "Nitrogen is at 53%, add more fertilizer!"), and the like. And players could resolve problems with a click.
At some point, the robot would report the plant ready for harvest. The player clicks. The robot slices off parts of the plant of commercial interest (like fruits, corn cobs, lettuce leaves), or if inapplicable, pulls the entire plant (carrots would be yanked, not cut), and puts it in a bin. The remainder of the plant is plowed under for fertilizer. Post-harvest, the robot reports the area as fallow, ready for another planting.
It'd be slow, compared to online farm games. There, crops are ready in as little as 2 hours, with the slowest crops taking maybe 7 days. Real crops would take at least 40 days, which may leave players feeling like they're lacking in accomplishment.
But unlike farm games, one would receive more than virtual money for this. The harvest bins would have a sale-able product, the profits from which could be split between the robot owner, the game producer, and the player. Playing the game could net you real actual money, possibly.
....nah, this is too insane.

Potatoes

Solanum tuberosum is quite an amazing plant for agriculture. It's native to Chile/Peru (Inca lands), but can be grown in the wet marshlands of east Texas, the dry deserts of California, the high mountains of Japan, the hot African savannah, the freezing tundra of Siberia, and the grasslands of Ireland. Most other plants couldn't withstand that kind of climatic variation. It is nutritious and the natives describe its origins as a gift from their very gods. You could live for two weeks on it and a minor protein source like a swig of milk, albeit not well. And all but one part of it is utter poison.
I'm speaking, of course, of the common potato. Between it and milk, one would only be deficient in molybdenum, which can be supplemented back with a bit of oatmeal.
I think we should grow potatoes in space. Why? Practice. If we want to send a mission to Mars or farther, we'd either need three months of food packed and weighing down the whole mission (More weight needs more fuel), or we can grow our own en-route. And plants are an excellent absorber of carbon dioxide and other things we humans need filtered from the air.
I also think we should experiment with potato genetics. Potato blights have ruined many-a-harvest because the farmer was growing a monoculture that was all equally susceptible to the disease.

The Abstracted Engineer: Scientists grow meat in a laboratory

The abstracted engineer reports that Scientists grow meat in a laboratory. Big news.
He jokes that "gooey pork with no texture" already exists in the form of hormel's famous potted meat product, but this is different. Spam is made of ground and reconstituted ham, this new meat was never a pig at any point, and thus more acceptable to vegetarian and vegan interests. It may also be more efficient, potentially, or healthier. I'll have to check the original CNN article for details.

Australia Sinks Carbon

An Australian farmer has found a way to both completely nullify the carbon output of his tractor, and save himself a metric insane amount of money. Cost effective carbon sink! And it saves him money to the tune of $500,000 (AUS) per year.
Apparently sinking his tractor's emissions also traps with it a great deal of nitrogen and phosphorous, both compounds that farmers usually shell out great deals of money to add to their crops. Nitrogen is necessary for plants to make protein, and phosphorous is necessary in lesser amounts to maintain metabolism. The farmer hopes that this will help keep his farm afloat during these times of worldwide competition, drought, and other headaches for farmers.
Australia, also, benefits greatly from this farmer's discovery. Despite having the best source of uranium in the world, Australia gets most of its electricity from coal power. (Australia also has considerable coal deposits.) The nuclear source is avoided because of environmental fears. This way, the excess carbon from the coal could be plowed into Australia's fields, saving it money and helping the environment, without a singular nuclear action.
The world's two biggest carbon producers, the United States and China, also have considerable farmland that could sink their carbon out of existence. Everyone wins. (Except the fertilizer companies.)

Central Compost

How about a company that has many big bins, and takes all the green waste in an area. The waste goes into bins, is occasionally turned, and when completely rotten, sold as organic fertilizer?

Ideally, this would take place on land that is useless for agriculture. Composting can take place almost anywhere, but benefits from a small amount of additional water, and from regular "turning" to add air. It produces a considerable amount of heat, which would make it strangely pleasant in colder climates.

The prime advantages of doing this are an increase in resources, a sustainable agricultural infrastructure, and a reduction in landfill space. The prime disadvantages are an increase in labor (these jobs would be absolutely terrible, and very low paying), increased water use, and the NIMBY principle would make people dislike it. (Compost piles smell strange, so people would complain if you built such a facility near them.)