At Aqua Vita Farms in Sherrill, fish provide nutrients for plants and plants ...
01.01.70
The practice is called aquaponics — a blend of aquaculture, or fish farming, and hydroponics, growing plants without soil.
In Sherrill, the process starts with four 5,000-gallon fish tanks filled with blue gill.
Filters remove solid wastes from the tank water, converting it to plant food. Gravity then delivers the water to 100-foot long plant beds, where lettuce seedlings float on rafts. Pumps return the water to the tanks after it has been naturally filtered by the plants, and the process starts again.
The closed-loop system creates 80 percent less waste than traditional farming, Doherty said.
And unlike the kind of hydroponics that uses water-soluble fertilizers to feed the plants, the fish at the Aqua Vita operation provide the nutrient load for the plants.
“We’re not dumping anything down the drain,” Doherty said. “We’re reusing everything.”
The result is seven varieties of heirloom lettuce that are finding audiences from chefs eager to serve locally produced greens to their customers.
Source: Syracuse.com
Strategies to save the only planet we have
01.01.70
This week the seven billionth citizen of the world was born, causing all of us to ponder the future. Does this rapid population growth pose a threat to our planet? Is this development a risk or is it also an opportunity?
One thing is clear: time is running out. When the wall between the east and west fell there were a little over five billion people on the earth. At the turn of the millennium there were already over six billion. By the middle of the 21st century we must reckon with over nine billion. We are already using the earth’s resources faster than they can regenerate. If this development continues unchecked, the requirement for raw materials – whether biomass, fossil fuels or ores – could more than double by 2050, and the same applies to energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. We would then actually need more than two earths, but we only have one.
The only answer is to use resources more sparingly. I see this as both a challenge and an opportunity. In the energy sector, we must focus much more on renewable energies and at the same time make energy generation, transmission and consumption considerably more efficient. The good news is that we already have all the technology required for this. Buildings can become generators instead of consumers of energy, light diodes use 80 percent less current than light bulbs, electric motors are three to four times more efficient then combustion engines. Modern gas and steam turbines supply twice as much current as the average conventional power plant, and the latest electricity highways transmit electricity over thousands of kilometers with very little loss.
Source: Reuters Blogs (blog)
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