This Is a Farm. Yes, It Floats

On the top deck of a three-tiered structure moored near downtown Rotterdam, brown and white cows graze on hay dropped from a conveyor belt above their heads. Canopies protect the cows from sun and collect rainwater they will drink. Sometimes the cows walk over to a machine that automatically milks them, or they shuffle out of the way of a robot trundling past to mop up manure that will be turned into organic fertilizer. "We call our cows upcycle ladies," says Minke van Wingerden of the Floating Farm, which sells the milk, cheese, and buttermilk produced by the cows in a small shop on dry land next to its harbor berth. The Floating Farm, which has been operational since 2019 and bills itself as the world's first such farm, isn't on entirely new terrain, reports the AP.

Efforts to put agriculture on or in the water are as old as the Aztecs, who built artificial islets to grow food long ago in what's now Mexico. But it's an idea that is getting new attention as a way of tackling both food security and the challenges of climate change. And it doesn't have to be as sophisticated as the Dutch farm. In coastal and low-lying areas of India and Bangladesh, the South Asian Forum for Environment is reviving a traditional practice of creating floating bamboo rafts that can keep seedlings above monsoon flood waters that can drown crops. Plastic covering and shade nets protect fragile plants, and solar-powered pumps collect rainwater to irrigate the seedlings.

Communications director Amrita Chatterjee says the rafts are "not a very conventional type of farming" and it takes patience to get used to them. But in a few years they've more than doubled, to 500, the number of floating farms. "Slowly, everyone is getting interested," she says. With increasingly erratic monsoons, the rafts have helped with food security, Chatterjee's group hopes the idea can be scaled up to make it much more commercially viable. Van Wingerden of Rotterdam sees agriculture on water as a viable response to flooding and rising sea levels and a way of bringing food production closer to consumers, meaning a lower carbon footprint. "When you have floating farms, you are climate adaptive," she says. "So you can keep on producing fresh, healthy food for the city." (Read the full story.)