DailyDirt: Growing Food2.0

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The world's population recently exceeded 7 billion, so maybe it's time to start thinking about new methods to grow food in sustainable ways. Farming techniques are already pretty advanced (compared to just a few decades ago), but there's always room for improvement. Here are some examples of food technology that could help keep food availability at a comfortable level before we have to resort to Soylent Green. By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
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Filed Under: food, freeze-dried, hydrogels, meat, shrimp, sustainable
Companies: shelf reliance


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  • identicon
    alternatives(), 5 Nov 2011 @ 12:22am

    I can not believe such an important topic

    as food has no comments.

    Things like PCBs in the sea (and now radioactive material from barrels and failed nuclear power) bio-accumulate. Such makes on-land farming in artificial man-made tanks allow marketing as 'not from the contaminated wild'.

    The 'X shrimp per acre' figure does not include the acres of land needed to collect photons for the feed the shrimp eats. Don't get too excited about the per acre figure until you calculate out how many acres are used in support.

    Now if one is seeking a new food market - consider using electricity to enhance growth. It works with animals like coral http://globalcoral.org/Electric%20Reefs.htm and there was research in the past - http://www.rexresearch.com/agro2/dudgrichelcult.pdf and http://www.rexresearch.com/agro2/laemstromelcult.pdf

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 5 Nov 2011 @ 3:03am

    Indoor farming is the future.
    Every house will have a box that magically produces food someday.

    Some crazy people are trying to work out how communities can become their own little colonies trying to produce everything one needs to be auto sufficient anywhere.
    http://opensourceecology.org/

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      bjwest, 5 Nov 2011 @ 5:29am

      Re:

      Some crazy people are trying to work out how communities can become their own little colonies trying to produce everything one needs to be auto sufficient anywhere.
      http://opensourceecology.org/

      We're way past this stage. There are far too many people on this planet for this to be viable for even the majority, let alone the whole. No, unless we do something to not only curb our population growth, but also decrease the present population, our current society is going to collapse.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Anonymous Coward, 5 Nov 2011 @ 6:40am

        Re: Re:

        and yet, the increase of population has also led to an increase in life spans and a better society as a whole. Sorry, but I never buy the whole "need to kill half the population" argument. Not unless you believe in a master race and whatnot.

        And as for "some crazy people" comments, well thats what they said about the internet as well

        link to this | view in chronology ]

        • identicon
          Anonymous Coward, 5 Nov 2011 @ 11:45am

          Re: Re: Re:

          Life span has little to do with future availability of raw resources except for the fact that increases the consumption number and helps put a strain on them.

          You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see what is going to happen, yeast used to produce beer do it all the time and die off in a closed system, earth is a closed system and so space eventually will run out, technology can only do so much.

          So yes population is a real concern, the old system was that rich countries bought what they needed from others it is getting expensive because the poor countries now are needing it for themselves for their own populations that are starting to be able to afford it.

          Japan and the UK are 2 ticking bombs on the food front, they both have more population than they have land to sustain them at current ways of production, Japan with 150 million people and the UK with 75 million people, if ever they lose access to food from Africa, Asia and America Latina they are screwed, so China with 2 billion people to feed and money to buy everything others produce is impacting that, India also is growing although India somehow is slow, maybe is all that corruption, they manage to be more corrupt than even Latin American countries or their Asian counterparts but they are growing and signs of exhaustion on the food production front have appeared, table waters are disappearing, salinity on soils increasing due to the water being used that will need more expensive equipment if you don't want to salt the earth there which reduces productivity, so we may be able to hold off the problem if we reach 16 billion people, but it will be something like you never seen before.

          In the USA people believe their orange juice is home grown, that is not true, if the US was to be forced to use only what they could produce things would look a lot grimmer.

          We don't need to kill half the population just learn how to live without the drive for "growth" and how to produce things at the individual level, everybody should be a factory.

          One important thing about living, it doesn't matter if you make money or not, what it does matter is how you learn to survive, your work is not really a job at Walmart your real work is learning to acquire the things you need with what you can find around you.

          link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Anonymous Coward, 6 Nov 2011 @ 10:51am

        Re: Re: open source ecology

        As a true fan and donor to open source ecology, they embody the whole libertarian free thinker ideal. That said, the open source ecology project itself is doomed to fail in its present form due to some management issues in the farm itself.

        However there have been several other groups that have spun off the framework and people network in this movement that are worth keeping a eye on.

        I have learned about so many new exciting tech opportunities thru this project I am setting up my own shop to build the items that are coming out of the open source websites.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 6 Nov 2011 @ 10:54am

    Re BJ west

    We are not even close to reaching maximum food production capacity in the world. New tech that is coming online like aquaponics, window farms and intensive techniques enable even the most marginal land to produce bountiful amounts of food.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 6 Nov 2011 @ 11:01am

    Re BJ west

    We are not even close to reaching maximum food production capacity in the world. New tech that is coming online like aquaponics, window farms and intensive techniques enable even the most marginal land to produce bountiful amounts of food.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    chris, 7 Nov 2011 @ 8:53am

    High-tech and food are just not two things I want to hear in the same sentence. There's more to eating than just nutrition, just like life is more than just trying to stay alive for as long as possible. Soulless lab grown food only prolongs the problem and when it reaches it's own production limits we will be in a much worse situation than we are now. What will we do then?

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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