The ongoing agricultural revolution

At last I am moved by a story to write: German Urban Farms the company's website is here.

The Frisch vom Dach, or Fresh from the Roof project, plans to create a 7,000-square-meter roof garden, complete with a fish farm, to provide Berliners with sustainable, locally-grown food....

The fish will be sold as food and, crucially, their excretions, especially the ammonia excreted through the gills, will be converted into nitrates. That will serve as fertilizer for the plants growing in green houses above the fish tanks. In turn, the plants will purify the water for the fish. The system for sustainable food production is known as "aquaponics."

The first instance of vertical farming, or industrial farming. Bringing the countryside into the city. As the Spiegel article points out, this model is low energy, unlike the more science fictional dreams of vertical farms. It also fits in with the permaculture crowd. That said, it does offer the prospect of advancing the cause of re-wilding (and of driving urbanisation faster).

I'd be interested in how much their prototype container farm manages to produce, since the idea of mass producing and distributing a container/greenhouse strikes me as being an efficient way to spread food production massively.

Windy Miller

This isn't science fiction, but unless I'm mis-reading this: Europe's onshore and offshore wind energy potential (Technical report ; No 6/2009) / European Environment Agency. It is both technically feasible, and market economic, to provide all of Europe's project energy needs via wind-power.

Leaving aside some of the environmental, social and economic considerations, Europe's raw wind energy potential is huge. Turbine technology projections suggest that it may be equivalent to almost 20 times energy demand in 2020.
[...]
Despite being a small proportion of the total technical potential, the economically competitive wind energy potential still amounts to more than three times projected demand in 2020.

The main limiting factors appear to be changes needed to integrate the Europe Wide energy grid to overcome lulls in the wind - so when it is is calm in Ireland the wind in Germany can still keep the juice flowing (this overcomes a central objection to wind power) but it would be a major infrastructure project.

high penetration levels of wind power will require major changes to the grid system i.e. at higher penetration levels
additional extensions or upgrades both for the transmission and the distribution grid
might be required to avoid congestion of the existing grid

They suggest a total economic potential of 12,200 Terra Watt hours in 2020. Given wind run on less than full capacity almost all the time, we need to roughly quarter that figure (I think).

So, all that is required is the political will, and the international integration and co-operation in order to provide energy for all of Europe's needs - and we can even use solar and bio-mass to complement wind, or (as in Scotland) hydro-electric power to off-set the variability.

Of course, in the UK, lots of landowners are objecting to "eye sores" and complaining about windmills, because they spoil the countryside (and thus the value of their property).

Eco Logic

The Swedes are keeping warm with Bunny Boilers!

I kid not, they are burning rabbits for fuel - apparently, rabbits are an alien plague, and they kill so many, turning them into fuel is a good way of getting rid of the bodies - obviously, they must be killing little ones without much eating on them.

That is the future of the green movement - biofuels kill bunnies!

Fed up

Uncle Charley Marx once wrote about ending the divide between town and countryside. Following a reference in Ken Macleod's latest, I found this interesting stuff on vertical farming:

It seems crazy to talk about farming in a hi-rise; the vision it gives rise to is of a kind of student-residence crammed with pot-smoking hippies who've traded their carpets for wheat. In fact, the approach is pretty hard-nosed and industrial, with very high outputs as its aim. And here's where it gets interesting from the point of view of our ambition to rewild the country: in the study entitled "Feeding 50,000 People, Anisa Buck, Stacy Goldberg and others conclude that a single building covering one city block, and up to 48 stories high depending on the design, can grow enough food to sustain 50,000 people. This calculation doesn't require any magical technology; there's no fairy-dust being evoked here, we could build such a structure now.

It would take about 1,200 such to feed the entire UK population - more sensibly, 150 to feed London. Now, I'm not thinking of "rewilding" but of opening up more space for us to live in, if we use less land for industrial agriculture, we can more in and garden the rest - I think the results would be equally eco friendly, and we could all spread out.

But, this would represent the conquest of the countryside by the city, the turning of farming into another factory/desk job with industrial scale feeding going on. Coupled with algae biofuel (which we could grow in some of the space abandoned from farming as well), a picture emerges that suggests we could return to the 1950's sci-fi vision of urban progress. Maybe we could build the megacities of the future. After all,t he algae might provide the energy source to make the whole shebang efficient...