Floating farms may someday help reinvent
the world’s food ecosystems.
HEY THERE,
COW BUOY
BY LAURA MALLONEE
LAURA MALLONEE (@LauraMallonee) writes about
photography for wired.
Karma, Courage, and Sustainabetty are special heifers.
They have uninterrupted views of Rotterdam harbor,
poop on a poop deck, and walk that gangplank to a pas-
ture. They and 31 other Meuse-Rhine-Issel cows clomped
aboard the world’s first floating dairy farm last May.
“It’s the best milk in the world,” says Peter van Wing-
erden, founder of the Dutch property development com-
pany Beladon, which built the barge. In 2012, hearing
that floods from Hurricane Sandy had crippled New York
City’s food distribution system, he imagined that water-
borne urban farms could boost food security. Why Rot-
terdam? A quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level.
Why 1,500-pound bovines? “If we could put big animals
inside the city on a floating barge, we could do anything.”
Getting a green light required years of answering ques-
tions from local officials: Crucially, do cows get seasick?
On a steady platform, their research concluded, heifers
likely won’t spew their cud. The 4,843-square-foot sta-
ble floats on concrete pontoons anchored by two steel
beams driven 65 feet into the seabed. The structure rises
and falls with the 8-foot tides and never tilts more than
11 inches, even in winds topping 70 mph or if the herd
crowds the stern to watch passing crustaceans.
Each day aboard this largely self-sustaining ecosystem,
cows eat potato peels and grass clippings, then set free
5,700-plus pounds of dung, which a Roomba-like robot
sucks up and dumps down a shaft to a deck below. There
it’s turned into fertilizer for the soccer fields and parks
that grow the grass feed. A milking robot pulls around 5
gallons from each heifer, which is bottled or made into
yogurt and then trucked to local grocery stores.
Van Wingerden has talked to food companies and
developers seeking to bring buoyant dairies to Singa-
pore, Dubai, and New York. Alas, experts say large-scale
floating farms would be prohibitively expensive and rely
on too many resources to remain sustainable. But van
Wingerden hopes the sight of cows grazing on a boat
sparks creative thinking for future food production.
Humans must produce 56 percent more food to feed a
global population of 9.8 billion by 2050. Sure, seems like
that’ll happen when pigs fly. Or, when cows float.
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