Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Making Urban Farming Scalable with Fish

A friend who writes about sustainable and novel development linked to an interesting article in one of her blog posts. The blog she linked to talks about making urban farms with fish and vegetables interacting. I LOVE the concept and have wanted to do something similar, but a little more micro, and feature rich for a long time.

My buddy Justin at the Borevitz Lab,  showed me a video a while ago that was based on mission to mars work. I don't remember the details but I remember also including solar panels to generate power for the system, as well as your home/office. I also figured you could absorb some water waste (say shower and liquid toilet waste) and using that in the whole system (I know I read this somewhere as well. Anyone got a link?) also capture the water as it evaporates from the plants to provide purified drinking water. Any overflow could be re-routed, and used for yard purposes, as it already is in many cities.

So not just vegetables, and fish, but power and clean water! I'd love to see this produced from modularized units  allowing different scales to be built easily by stacking different units together. I also always thought this would be great for primo restaraunts to ALWAYS have fresh veggies and fish available. Some people may freak out having there poop and potatoes so literally close, despite the real circle of life reality, but that's not me.

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Justin updated me with some links:

He does research with simulating day/light cycles, different conditions, and wavelengths of light:

http://borevitzlab.uchicago.edu/resources/growth-chambers

Also he reposted the mission to mars video from NASA:

http://borevitzlab.uchicago.edu/resources/growth-chambers/PlantLifeSupportSystem.wmv

1 comment:

Jill Yoe said...

Tom, here's a hot bed of good plans that I think you would enjoy reading about...
http://www.mcdonough.com/writings_architecture.htm

I'll see if I can find some images or videos of some of the buildings he is referencing.