Our trip to The Netherlands has been filled with the outdoors. Just being outside, exploring, and lots of swimming.🏊♀️
It did help that the weather was good! Only one tiny bit of rain, other than that it was (and is!) warm & sunny.
The trip that I want to talk about here is the Floating Farm Rotterdam.🐮The world’s first floating farm at that.
👉Floating Farm. What does it mean?
Well, it is literally a cow’s enclosure that is built on a huge raft.
Picture this: a double raft with two levels attached to the mainland with several detachable bridges for the cows and people.
The cows can walk in and out from the floating raft to the meadow as they want via their own personal bridge.🐄
👉Why is the farm floating?
-A raft will never flood. It will just float on top of the water
-When a meadow is waterlogged, the cows can destroy the fields, so keeping them on the raft during very wet days will ensure the land stays in top notch condition
-It encourages city farming because little space is needed. The floating part of the farm is small; it is built vertically on two floors. Floor 1 is for equipment and floor 2 is for the cows. The raft is also very mobile. It can just be moved to another dock with a meadow
-The dairy from the cows supplies the local area, which minimises carbon footprint of travel, stockage and cooling
👉Self-sufficient & circular economy
-The floating farm purifies rainwater
-It is equipped with solar panels (on a small adjacent raft) for electricity needs
-Manure is reused
-Cow feed comes from old bread from local bakeries and from grass cut from the city’s football club (Feyenoord – for those who know about Dutch football)!
💦Water is needed
-But note: a floating farm obviously only works where there is lots of water – canals, rivers, and general calm waterways
👉Visiting
-You can see everything. There’s a roof but it’s all transparent
-There’s a shop and a cafe where you can sample and try the produce
🤝Its mission?
-Creating a circular way of working and to be climate adaptive. They call it a transfarmation.😉