ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — On the upper deck of a three-story building moored near central Rotterdam, brown and white cows graze on hay dropped from a conveyor belt overhead and orange peels salvaged from supermarket juicers in the port city. Overhead canopies protect the cows from the sun and collect rainwater that they will eventually drink.
Sometimes the Maas-Rijn-IJssel cows – named after three Dutch rivers – walk to a machine that automatically milks them, or shuffle out of the way of a robot that lumbers past to clean up manure that is turned into organic fertilizer.
“We call our cows upcycle ladies,” says Minke van Wingerden of the Floating Farm, who sells the milk, cheese and buttermilk from the cows in a small shop on dry land next to the harbor berth.
The Floating Farm, which has been operational since 2019 and bills itself as the first farm in the world, is not on entirely new ground. Attempts to bring agriculture to or from water are as old as the Aztecs, who long ago built artificial islands to grow food in what is now Mexico.
But it’s an idea that’s gaining new attention as a way to address both food security and food safety the challenges of climate change. And it doesn’t have to be as advanced as the Dutch farm, which came about after Van Wingerden’s husband Peter witnessed the food shortages that hit New York after Hurricane Sandy devastated the city in 2012.
In coastal and low-lying areas of India and Bangladesh, a non-governmental organization is reviving a traditional practice: making floating rafts that can keep seedlings above monsoon floods that can drown crops.
The South Asian Forum for Environment, based in Kolkata, has made a number of technological improvements for what it calls ‘climate-resilient float farming’. The bamboo rafts are built larger and heavier to better withstand storms. Plastic covers and shade nets protect delicate plants, and solar-powered pumps collect rainwater to irrigate the seedlings. And the organization works with local research institutes to provide farmers with the best possible climate-resilient seeds and to pass on knowledge about pest control. Communications director Amrita Chatterjee said this could become more urgent when pests proliferate in times of extreme heat, such as this summer, where temperatures reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) in some locations.
Chatterjee said the rafts “are not a very conventional form of farming” and it takes patience to get used to them. But in just a few years, the number of floating farms in several villages has more than doubled to 500. Vegetables such as medicinal plants, spinach and chillies are among the products grown on the floating platforms, and farmers can also raise crabs for fattening for the floating box market.
“Slowly everyone is starting to get interested,” Chatterjee said.
With increasingly erratic monsoons, the rafts have contributed to food security, Chatterjee said. They were also helpful when the Indian state of West Bengal was hit by a one-two punch of a cyclone in 2020, followed by COVID-19, she said.
Farmers using the rafts now feed themselves and sell some surplus in local markets, Chatterjee said. Her group hopes the idea can be scaled up to make it more commercially viable.
Floating farms will clearly be scalable in Southeast Asia in the coming decades, but education about the technology could be a barrier to adoption in some places, said Craig Jenkins, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
Back in Rotterdam, the owners of the Floating Farm mention a number of reasons for putting farms on the water. That includes urbanization bringing more people into cities, making it sensible to bring food sources closer to them. They say the extreme weather caused by climate change – heavy rains and flooding of cities and farmlands – makes their approach climate-adaptive to feeding those cities.
Jake Boswell, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Ohio State University, said the success of floating farms will likely vary by region. Although much of the world’s population lives in coastal areas, only some of those communities also farm in areas prone to flooding or storms, he said. That could make it more cost-effective to invest in floating homes instead of floating farms to adapt to sea level rise, he said.
“I think the one in Rotterdam is an interesting demonstration,” he said. “I would find it difficult to see it as a scalable project.”
Scaling up and substantially contributing to the sustainability of urban food systems is a challenge that floating farms have in common with vertical farms, says Daniel Petrovics, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam who has studied the scaling up of various climate interventions, including in the energy and Agriculture.
“You have to think about things like: what is the local diet, what do people eat? Is this a breeding ground for that? Which stakeholders benefit from it?” he said. “Is it to help alleviate food poverty in a city or is it just some kind of gimmick from, say, a company that’s just looking for a return on investment?”
The owners of the Dutch floating farm are already moving to expand beyond just their cows.
They plan to add a second floating farm in the same harbor for vertical farming: growing vegetables indoors, under lights in stacks of grow beds, irrigated with water partially purified with the heat of cow manure.
Minke Van Wingerden sees water-based agriculture as a viable response to flooding and rising sea levels and a way to bring food production closer to consumers, which means a lower ecological footprint.
“If you have floating farms, you are climate adaptive,” says Van Wingerden. “This way you can continue to produce fresh, healthy food for the city.”
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Walling reported from Chicago.
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