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factual resources re permaculture, aquaponics, etc.

redwalker

SOC-12
Now, I've posted a bunch of stuff on some loosely defined topics.

I want to draw the line between fact and fiction.

If we're arguing about fictional universes, there's no point, because we can start by saying, "In my sci-fi fiction, I make the rules, so what I say goes."

If we're arguing about facts, we might get sloppy and use terms like "tech level." I have yet to see a single work on engineering management, technical history, etc. which can actually give a quantitative chart of real-life tech levels comparable to Traveller's charts of fictitious tech levels. I get frustrated when I see what seems to be two different posters using the same terms to apparently refer to widely different concepts. So I would like some better terminology.

Some people have raised excellent points -- e.g. the fact that light maintenance on a power drill might require O-rings and so on.

However, I have yet to see any textbook or college course that can map out the inter-relationships between tools. Lots of people say, "Oh, it's vast, it's incalculable, there's no way to express how fragile the network of technology is." Well, that doesn't convince me. I'd like to see a professor of history or engineering write a book that breaks it on down and shows exactly how dependent specific tools are on having a supporting network of tools. The closest thing I've seen is some of the writing of Bucky Fuller.

Everything I've seen convinces me that humans are capable of making very small bases of tech into very self-sufficient enterprises.

Now I start out reading Bucky Fuller and pretty soon I'm into the Spaceship Earth hooey and before you know it I'm listening to a bunch of hippies who make compost out of human manure.


So without further ado, here's some links to the hippie tree-hugging stuff that influences my speculation on environmental topics.

http://www.permacultureactivist.net/

http://www.cropking.com/aquaponics.shtml?ref=google

http://www.aquaponics.com/

http://www.bfi.org/

http://www.weblife.org/humanure/default.html

http://www.daviscaves.com/index.shtml

Now, any grammar school kid can look at these websites and say, "That's a load of pinko hippie propaganda, I don't believe a word they say."

That's fine, but doubt is cheap. I have no great personal love for hippies, and I would gladly ditch them and their ideas of organic gardening if I could find a nice, big scientific community that thought it was a bunch of pseudo-science.

The problem is, I keep looking for scientists to disprove this environmental stuff, like Bjorn Lomberg, and his numbers don't seem to add up.

So maybe notions like the earthbox (earthbox.com) and the fish tanks for growing trout (cropking.com) are really just snake-oil scams to make money from gullible consumers. But it looks to me that they work.

Now, maybe they work, but they're highly dependent on industrial civilization and they couldn't work for an isolated colony. That's an awfully hard claim to test. If I were writing a peer-reviewed paper pro or con, what kind of journal would be competent to publish it? History of science? Agricultural science? Sociology?

And if we could figure out how to prove or disprove that in a scholarly fashion, maybe we could find an academic discipline that teaches courses on how to track the exact dependence of power drills on O-rings. Would that be engineering? Industrial management? Operations research?
 
The main problem with a lot of the 'hippie' ideas is that there are typically certain components of their systems that are routinely available in modern culture, and thus seem trivial to the designers, but are in fact quite difficult to construct.

Aquaponics, for example, may well be a viable method of food production. However, it requires significant power (probably electrical), manufactured water filters, and if you're going to be actually taking anything out of the system, chemical food.

On average, producing one kcal of food via biological systems will require 100-1000 Wh of energy, with increasingly large power consumption the higher up the food chain you go (adding fish reduces the efficiency of the garden substantially). A normal 2000 calorie diet thus requires 200+ kWh of power per day; at 7.5c per kWh that's $15/day or more. That's if you were just taking out the vegetables; the fish are much more expensive.

The usual solution to this is solar power; plants are natural solar collectors, and so about 20 square meters of sunlit area will accomplish the same thing. These systems occur naturally, and are commonly called 'rivers'.

When discussing vegetable production, bear in mind that most people don't get that large a fraction of their calories from vegetables.
 
Originally posted by Anthony:
The main problem with a lot of the 'hippie' ideas is that there are typically certain components of their systems that are routinely available in modern culture, and thus seem trivial to the designers, but are in fact quite difficult to construct.

Aquaponics, for example, may well be a viable method of food production. However, it requires significant power (probably electrical), manufactured water filters, and if you're going to be actually taking anything out of the system, chemical food.

On average, producing one kcal of food via biological systems will require 100-1000 Wh of energy, with increasingly large power consumption the higher up the food chain you go (adding fish reduces the efficiency of the garden substantially). A normal 2000 calorie diet thus requires 200+ kWh of power per day; at 7.5c per kWh that's $15/day or more. That's if you were just taking out the vegetables; the fish are much more expensive.

The usual solution to this is solar power; plants are natural solar collectors, and so about 20 square meters of sunlit area will accomplish the same thing. These systems occur naturally, and are commonly called 'rivers'.

When discussing vegetable production, bear in mind that most people don't get that large a fraction of their calories from vegetables.
Excellent post. Thanks for putting some numbers on this so I can compare and contrast.

As for the whole outdoor farming thing, I think it's over-rated.

I initially started researching organic farming as a means to prevent desertification and to reclaim deserts. My major area of interest is applying tech to real-world problems, and I'm concerned with a lot of highly polluted real-world areas where farming outdoors is not practical. The list of things that can go wrong with open-air crops is phenomenally long. With indoor crops, the vegetables can be a glorified filter system for the fish. In densely packed urban environments, it can be more practical to raise lowly critters like earthworms and bugs, feed them to fish, and use a minimum amount of vegetables to filter the water and keep it livable for the fish. (And it can be advisable to avoid using fishmeal as a food product for fish, but that's another story.)

In a totally enclosed environment, one can do tricks that are fun and interesting from my viewpoint, like messing with the light to accelerate growth. That kind of trick may be impractical for lots of circumstances, but it's the sort of science-fair trick that keeps me motivated enough to research this stuff.

From a basic cost standpoint, most folks might say, "Heck, farm outdoors, it makes more sense. Farm fish in a pond or fenced river." And that's a good case to consider, I'm just not going to research it in depth.

Enclosed farm environments in desert regions can use artificial solar systems to generate electricity. This does add layers of complication to the apparatus, but can potentially decrease the complexity of the biological problems because the environment is totally controlled.

One problem I'm going to have to examine in depth is the real-life cost of energy in deserts. For many desert reclamation projects, the countries hosting them have incredibly cheap energy costs (cheap in dollars, not necessarily in ecological impact). So high-tech tricks like desalination (a.k.a. desalinization) are cost-effective -- for the moment -- but might not be sustainable in the long run.

So, after I can put better numbers on those energy costs, I'll post them.
 
Originally posted by Anthony:
The main problem with a lot of the 'hippie' ideas is that there are typically certain components of their systems that are routinely available in modern culture, and thus seem trivial to the designers, but are in fact quite difficult to construct.

Aquaponics, for example, may well be a viable method of food production. However, it requires significant power (probably electrical), manufactured water filters, and if you're going to be actually taking anything out of the system, chemical food.

On average, producing one kcal of food via biological systems will require 100-1000 Wh of energy, with increasingly large power consumption the higher up the food chain you go (adding fish reduces the efficiency of the garden substantially). A normal 2000 calorie diet thus requires 200+ kWh of power per day; at 7.5c per kWh that's $15/day or more. That's if you were just taking out the vegetables; the fish are much more expensive.

The usual solution to this is solar power; plants are natural solar collectors, and so about 20 square meters of sunlit area will accomplish the same thing. These systems occur naturally, and are commonly called 'rivers'.

When discussing vegetable production, bear in mind that most people don't get that large a fraction of their calories from vegetables.
Now, when I first saw that 10 kCal energy expended to deliver 1 kCal of food energy, I thought it looked wrong. It turns out that 10 kCal is a good estimate for modern America, but not for most farms.

My source below is highly regarded by some:
http://dieoff.org/page69.htm

Now these guys (Giampetro and Pimentel) have more than a few questionable axioms, but they are a typical baseline. A very radical geologist might believe in the theory of "abiotic petroleum," which claims that so-called fossil fuels are not derived from fossils, but rather from reactions below the earth's surface. "Abiotic petroleum" has almost no adherents within the U.S.A. For the moment, I'm assuming that "abiotic petroleum" theories are false and that fossil fuels really are non-renewable.

<quote>
Humans transform energy inputs found in their environment into a flow of useful energy used to sustain their social and economic needs. This conversion can be obtained in two ways. First, by transforming food energy into muscular power within the human body; this is called endosomatic or metabolic energy. Second, by transforming energy outside the human body, such as burning gasoline in a tractor; this is called exosomatic energy. In order to have either endosomatic or exosomatic energy conversions, society must have access to adequate energy inputs.
...
The access to fossil energy removed the limitation on the density at which exosomatic energy can be utilized, and societies experienced a dramatic increase in the rate of energy consumption. The exo/endo energy ratio has jumped from about 4 to 1, a value typical of solar powered societies, to more than 40 to 1 in developed countries (in the U.S. it is more than 90 to 1). Clearly, this brought about a dramatic change in the role of the endosomatic energy flow. Endosomatic energy, that is food and human labor, no longer delivers power for direct economic processes. Humans generate the flow of information needed to direct huge flows of exosomatic power produced by machines and powered primarily by fossil energy. To provide an example of the advantage achieved: a small gasoline engine will convert 20% of the energy input of one gallon of fuel into power. That is, the 38,000 kcal in one gallon of gasoline can be transformed into 8.8 KWh, which is about 3 weeks of human work equivalent. (Human work output in agriculture = 0.1 HP, or 0.074 KW, times 120 hours.)

Fossil energy and the food system.

More than 10 kcalories (kilogram-calories or "large calories") of exosomatic energy are spent in the U.S. food system per kcalorie of food delivered to the consumer. Put another way, the food system consumes ten times more energy than it provides to society in food energy. However, since in the U.S. the exo/endo energy ratio is 90/1, each endosomatic kcalorie (each kcalorie of food metabolized to sustain human activity) induces the circulation of 90 kcalorie of exosomatic energy, basically fossil. This explains why the energy cost of food of 10 exosomatic kcalories per endosomatic kcalorie is not perceived as high when measured in economic terms. Actually, despite a net increase in the energy and monetary cost per kcalorie of food in the U.S. over the last decades, the percentage of disposable income spent by U. S. citizens on food has steadily decreased and is now only about 15 percent of disposable income.

Based on a 10/1 ratio, the total direct cost of the daily diet in the U.S. is approximately 35,000 kcalories of exosomatic energy per capita (assuming 3,500 keel/ capita of food available per day for consumption). However, since the average return of one hour of labor in the U.S. is about 100,000 kcalories of exosomatic energy, the flow of exosomatic energy required to supply the daily diet is made accessible by about 20 minutes of labor.

In subsistence societies, about 4 kcalories of exosomatic energy (basically in the form of biomass) are required per kcalorie of food consumed. Thus, the total direct cost of the daily diet is much lower in absolute terms, approximately 10,000 kcalories of exosomatic energy per capita (assuming a food supply of 2, 500 kcal/day per capita).
</quote>

Well, note that in the United States, we tend to truck our food halfway across the country -- sometimes we eat bananas from South America. In a small colony, food is local and therefore has a lower energy cost. So the U.S.A., at 10 kCal of energy per 1 kCal of food energy, has *lost* efficiency from the old days of 4 kCal of energy per 1 kCal of food energy.

One factor I still don't know how to quantify is the effect of earthworms on the soil. In an organic farm, I think that some of the energy going into the vegetables is prepared by earthworms, who are getting it from the soil, not directly from sunlight.

Also, a small, efficient colony would probably use simple methods that require few technological artifacts but a relatively high level of savvy. (E.g. the vertical gardening techniques seen in Mel Bartholomew's _Square_Foot_Gardening_.)

A lot depends on how nutritious the local soil is to earthworms.
 
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