Illustration of proposed floating farm by Beladon.

We’ve written about floating solar panels before, and created a floating fence at Xandari Harbour to keep out water hyacinth, but there are plans in Rotterdam for a floating cow farm that will process milk and yogurt, according to Senay Boztas, writing for the Guardian:

Do cows get seasick? It’s not a question farmers often ask, except in the Dutch city of Rotterdam where a team of developers plans to build a floating dairy.

“They won’t here,” says Minke van Wingerden of Beladon, a company involved with water-based projects from a luxury hotel to this floating farm proposed for Rotterdam harbour. “In Friesland, where I come from, sometimes they bring cows from one place to another on a small barge,” van Wingerden recalls. “[The floating farm] will be very stable. When you are on a cruise ship, you aren’t seasick.”

Beladon’s €2.5m project (£2m) envisages 40 cows on a 1,200 square metre floating platform, producing 1,000 litres of milk a day to be pasteurised and processed into yogurt in a dairy on the floor below.

The building is planned in concrete, relatively light and buoyant, with galvanised steel frames and a special membrane floor that lets bovine urine soak through. A machine will mop up dry cow dung as another robot tops up food stations. The cows will wander in and out of stalls and the milking section, and can also potter over a ramp to real-life pasture on the land.

On the ground floor, as well as the processing of milk, water from the cows’ urine will be purified and used to grow red clover, alfalfa and grass under artificial light for fodder. Cow’s manure will either be used or dispatched to a nearby farm.

The project developers, who hope to begin building this autumn, say this kind of “closed-loop system” will be a paradigm for feeding cities in an ever more populous and urbanised world.

“The world’s population is rising, and most cities in deltas are sinking because of more and more concrete,” says van Wingerden. “My husband Peter [chief executive of Beladon] visited New York, there was Hurricane Sandy and he saw the shelves were empty; there was only food for two days. He thought we had to do things in another way, and the idea came: why not build a floating farm?”

For an entrepreneur involved in building a floating cruise terminal, nightclub and five star hotel, this wasn’t such a strange idea. He found fellow thinkers in the Dutch city farm Uit Je Eigen Stad (from your own town), which aims to reconnect city dwellers with their food, dairy innovation group Courage, and the Rotterdam harbour’s SOFIE fund. These groups are putting up the cash and trying to hammer out planning permission with Rotterdam council.

Johan Bosman, cofounder of the Uit Je Eigen Stad farm, restaurant and market in Rotterdam, said: “The world will grow, and more and more people will live in delta cities. Expanding cities need unbuilt areas and green space for housing purposes, so there’s less space for traditional food production. The logical consequence is that we will look to the water to produce some of the fresh food.

“In the Netherlands, fresh food is available and we don’t have very large cities, but we have a lot of agricultural and maritime expertise. We are combining these sectors to try to make an innovative circular farm to produce fresh dairy products, and by doing so make the city more resilient.”

He admits it’s a challenge: “Cows are pretty hard. They are large animals, and there are a lot of rules. We are also working on a floating farm for egg-laying chickens and a floating greenhouse.”

Read the rest of the article here.