News                           Links                                      ToDo

Land Not Bombs

Current industrial agriculture practices are the main cause of global warming and vanishing habitat with its consequent species extinction. Additionally, the use of nitrogen fertilizer is killing large areas in the ocean¹. Huge Floating Ocean Crop Circles are a solution to these problems.

Imagine a huge circular "wall" whose energy absorbing design encloses a huge, wave-free ocean surface useful for agriculture. This is the simple description of the Floating Ocean Crop Circle (FOCC). (See, for example, the Pacific Crop Circle image.)

In the following, I will argue that a HUGE (>100 mile diameter) FOCC could free the land of its agricultural burden, while increasing the ocean's bioproductivity.

Ocean surface bioproductivity is usually limited by essential mineral content. Typically, the ocean is about as biologically productive as a very dry desert. The reason for this is that most of the ocean is very deep, with an average depth of 12,200 feet. Essential-for-cell-life minerals sink to the bottom. Once on the bottom, there is insufficient light to support much life. The ocean's bioproductivity is greatly enhanced whenever the mineral rich waters at the bottom reach the surface.⁵

Efficient ocean agricultural design keeps these minerals on the surface, preferably bound in biological cells for as long as possible. This requires stability and reliable membranes to separate the mineral rich crop growth medium from the ambient surface seawater. The various means to this end define the scope of ocean-based industrial agricultural design.

Wave abatement is a prerequisite for almost any conceivable ocean farm. In whatever technological form wave abatement is achieved, it will be deployed to protect the quiescent interior of a vast crop circle floating on the ocean's surface. A Floating Ocean Crop Circle will include the means to manufacture the wave-abating boundary that forms its circumference. These huge crop circles will be able to increase (or decrease) in size according to needs and resources. Furthermore, the material to construct this wave-abating naval architecture will mostly be secured locally, (see Cement), from the ocean floor's calciferous ooze, and from locally grown building materials.

Fertilizer for a Floating Ocean Crop Circle comes from mineral rich waters pumped up from the ocean floor.⁶  Such a farm could satisfy its material and energy needs for plant life on site, and produce vast amounts of food, fuel, and construction material for export.

Ocean based agriculture can reasonably expect the following:

• wave-abated ocean surface costing less then $100/acre,
• a cheap and abundant "municipal" solution of essential minerals for crop fertilization, and 
• a tropical climate (The FOCC is near the equator).

Successful farmers will choose their crops and their farming technique starting from these basics but otherwise limited mostly by creativity and commodity prices.

Probably the first and most important crop produced in a FOCC is oil producing algae.²This is a particularly "natural" agricultural niche for a fledgling FOCC, because oil producing algae requires nothing more then the quiescent (and hence harvestable) ocean surface fertilized by ocean-bottom waters to yield bio-diesel bounty. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, to replace all transportation fuels in the US, requires 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require about 15,000 square miles. Thus, a single FOCC, just 138.2 miles in diameter, would provide all current oil fuel needs in the USA. If the construction cost is $1000/Foot (for the wave-abating circumference), then the total cost would be about $2,292,368,774. 

According to former White House economist Lawrence Lindsey in What the Iraq war will cost the U.S., on January 11, 2008, "The bill for Iraq over the past five years is now approaching a cumulative $500 billion" . Had we invested in a single FOCC to grow our own oil in 2003, with the money we have spent on the Iraq War, then today we would not only satisfy our own oil needs sustainably, but we could sell more then we consume to the rest of the world.

The "energy crisis," like many psuedo-problems, is closely linked to a corrupt banking system and various sociopathic traditions and institutions that exist by creating "profits" by engineered scarcity. If the very real problem of global warming is going to be successfully solved, reason rather then small-minded greed must prevail as the means of allocating engineering resources.

The good news is that global warming is a technologically solvable problem. Floating Ocean Crop Circles could reduce atmospheric CO2 generation by freeing the land from crops, and by sequestering carbon in agricultural products on the otherwise virtually barren ocean. Global warming can be stopped by pumping the mineral-rich ocean bottom waters to the surface, thereby using the same mechanism the Earth has long used to change the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Combining this essential goal with the objective of returning habitat to the biota exterminated by conventional agriculture, and thereby minimizing species extinction, is necessary for the continuation of agrarian civilization in the long term.

It remains to be seen if the United States of America can muster sufficient idealism, vision, ingenuity, and focused-good-will to overcome the various economic interests that will either lose or change to accommodate the necessary 21st century agricultural revolution. The chaos that will naturally accompany the rapid change this ocean based agricultural initiative requires, can be eased with good national policy. Specifically, the Federal Government needs legislation to rapidly develop wave energy & abatement technology, together with laws designed to assist farmers who are willing to move their skills and capital onto the ocean.

The alternatives really are dire. (See global warming basics.) Either we consciously design our future, or global warming will progressively disable our civilization and make it that much harder to adapt proactively to the coming climate.

Footnotes

"loose" Notes Links and Searches