Among the cranes and containers of the port of Rotterdam is a surreal sight: a herd of cows peacefully feeding on board what calls itself the world’s first floating farm.<\/p>\n
In the low-lying Netherlands where land is scarce and climate change is a daily threat, the three-story glass and steel platform aims to show the “future of breeding”.<\/p>\n
The buoyant bovines live on the top floor, while their milk is turned into cheese, yogurt and butter on the middle level, and the cheese is matured at the bottom.<\/p>\n
“The world is under pressure,” says Minke van Wingerden, 60, who runs the farm with her husband Peter.<\/p>\n
“We want the farm to be as durable and self-sufficient as possible.”<\/p>\n
The cows are a sharp contrast to the huge ships and the smoke from the refineries of Europe’s biggest seaport, which accounts for 13.5 percent of the country’s emissions.<\/p>\n
With their floating farm, which opened in 2019, Peter and Minke say they wanted to “bring the countryside into the town”, boost consumer awareness and create agricultural space.<\/p>\n
The Dutch are no strangers to advanced farming methods, using a network of huge greenhouses in particular to become the world’s second biggest agricultural exporter after the United States.<\/p>\n
‘Moves with the tide’<\/p>\n
The Netherlands is one of Europe’s largest per capita emitters of climate change gases and faces a major problem with agricultural emissions, particularly in the dairy sector which produces large amounts of methane from cows.<\/p>\n
Those emissions in turn fuel the rising waters that threaten to swamp the country, a third of which lies below sea-level, and further reduce the land in one of the most densely populated nations on Earth.<\/p>\n
The floating farm therefore aims to keep its cows’ feet dry in both the long-term, by being sustainable, and the short-term, by, well, floating.<\/p>\n
“We are on the water, so the farm moves with the tide — we rise and fall up to two meters. So in case of flooding, we can continue to produce,” says Minke van Wingerden.<\/p>\n
In terms of sustainability, the farm’s cows are fed on a mixture of food including grapes from a foodbank, grain from a local brewery, and grass from local golf courses and from Rotterdam’s famed Feyenoord football club — saving on waste as well as the emissions that would be required to create commercial feed for the animals.<\/p>\n
Their manure is turned into garden pellets — a process that helps further cut emissions by reducing methane — and their urine is purified and recycled into drinking water for the cows, whose stable is lined with dozens of solar panels that produce enough electricity for the farm’s needs.<\/p>\n
‘Cows don’t get seasick’<\/p>\n
The farm is run by a salaried farmer but the red and white cows, from the Dutch-German Meuse-Rhin-Yssel breed, are milked by robots.<\/p>\n
The cheeses, yogurts and pellets are sold at a roadside shop alongside fare from local producers.<\/p>\n
The products are also sold to restaurants in town by electric vehicles.<\/p>\n
“I was immediately seduced by the concept,” says Bram den Braber, 67, one of 40 volunteers at the farm, as he fills bottles of milk behind the counter of the store.<\/p>\n
“It’s not blood running through my veins, it’s milk.”<\/p>\n
The idea of the farm is also to make farming “more agreeable, interesting and sexy”, and not just to be environmentally friendly, says Minke van Wingerden.<\/p>\n
When she and her husband first approached port authorities with the idea to build a floating farm, they said “are you nuts?”, she recalls.<\/p>\n
But the farm is set to turn a profit for the first time at the end of 2021, with consumers apparently ready to pay the 1.80 euro ($2.12) a liter for milk produced there, compared to around one euro at a supermarket.<\/p>\n
They are also aiming to build a second floating farm to grow vegetables, and to export their idea, with a project already under way in the island nation of Singapore.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, while farming goes greener, the animals don’t.<\/p>\n
“No, the cows don’t get seasick,” says van Wingerden. “The water moves only a little bit, it’s like you were on a cruise ship.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Source: Voice of America<\/p>\n<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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