Futuristic farms

Freethink’s Future of Food shows how efficient farming in the Netherlands is producing 20 times more food with 1/4 the water and the most sustainable agriculture systems in the world.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 27th, 2019 at 10:00 am and is filed under business, environment, Farming, food, rural. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to Futuristic farms

  1. Andrei's avatar Andrei says:
    27/10/2019 at 6:41 pm

    Oh how the ironies abound in that video with its images of wind turbines whop whop whopping as they turn and repleat with usual platitudes towards the Goddess of sustianability™.

    But the truth is that they are growing tomatoes and peppers in the Netherlands where they would not normally grow by growing them in greenhouses in which they artificially increase the concerntration of the dread “pollutant” CO2 tp promote their growth.

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  2. Roj Blake's avatar Roj Blake says:
    28/10/2019 at 10:27 am

    Andrei, your ignorance knows no bounds. Or, like all the deniers, the Luddites, the “I’m OK Fuck You Jack” types, you distort and dissemble.

    Yes, CO2 is increased in Greenhouses, but in a controlled manner. No producer pumps ever-increasing amounts of CO2 in as the beneficial effects soon become a disaster as rates increase. And it is telling that you have never worked in a Greenhouse. It is not a comfortable place to be.

    Every plant has a particular genetically-determined temperature range in which it grows quite happily, but temperatures outside this range can wreak havoc on that plant’s life cycle. Thus, increases in surface temperatures in tropical and subtropical regions, such as those expected by the end of this century, are predicted to reduce rice and maize harvests by 20% to 40%.

    and

    Conducted over six growth years on field sites in Japan, Australia, and the United States, the study compared crops grown in normal conditions with ones grown in nearby experimental plots where the air is enriched with CO2 via open-air sprayers. The current atmospheric CO2 level is 400 parts per million; in the enriched plots, it was between 546 and 586 parts per million, a level scientists expect the atmosphere to reach in four to six decades.

    In addition to wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans, which all use a form of photosynthesis known as C3, Myers and his colleagues studied corn and sorghum, which use C4 photosynthesis, a faster kind. They found relatively little effect of CO2 enrichment on the nutritional value of the C4 crops.

    In the C3 crops, however, they found significant declines in zinc and iron. The largest was a 9.3 percent drop in the zinc level in wheat. They also found reduced levels of protein in wheat, rice, and peas, but not in soybeans.

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  3. Andrei's avatar Andrei says:
    29/10/2019 at 9:09 am

    Oh dear Roj – the pessimism of you doom and gloomers never ceases to amaze.

    You trawl the internet to find support for your despondancy and then take what you find to be holy writ.

    Reality – more of Europe is now in forest than was in 1900

    Reality – globally the world is producing more food than ever and yeilds per hectare are rising

    A truly golden age all made possible by industrialization powered by fossil fuels.

    It is far from paradise to be sure – there are problems and I too yearn for the bucolic paradise of the imaginary past¹

    But I sure as hell am grateful that all my kids have grown up to be healthy and prosperous and I didn’t have to bury them youn because of a typhoid epidemic or a famine

    (1) Your reading assignment for this week is “Cold Comfort Farm” by Stella Gibbons

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