Case 26: Serres without heating or irrigation

The market

Controlled ecological agriculture, also known as agriculture in greenhouse, has quadrupled or fivefold in the last decade, going from a marginal but traditional agricultural activity to a global activity of +$ 100 billion. The area of ​​greenhouses, both in plastic and glass, reaches 630,000 hectares, including 443,000 in Asia only. The Mediterranean covers more than 100,000 hectares, Spain being the European leader with around 55,000 hectares. The region around Almeria and Murcia (Spain) covers 200 square kilometers. The Netherlands may have the highest percentage of covered agricultural land with approximately 0.25 % of the total land mass in the form of greenhouses. The Netherlands have around 9,000 greenhouses operating on +10,000 hectares, employ around 150,000 people and generate 4.5 billion euros in fruits, vegetables, plants and flowers, 80 percent of which are exported. Turkey is quickly becoming one of the world leaders in greenhouse tomatoes with a production of more than 6 million tonnes. In recent years, China has become the largest controlled environmental agriculture operator. Its soil -free agriculture includes coal ash, peat foam, vermiculite, coconut, sawdust, rice ball mixed with organic fertilizer, including mineralized pork manure. These Chinese techniques, already described by Marco Polo in his newspaper, are inexpensive and adapted to local conditions explaining the competitiveness of the product. This opened the market to innovation and a portfolio of substitution propeller chemicals, ranging from hydrocarbons (propane, butane), hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), dimethyl ether (DME), compressed propellants (carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon Air, nitrogen and nitrous oxide) arrived on the market. Last year, around 15 billion propellant gas containers were sold worldwide, Europe being at the top of the market with a production of +5 billion units. Steel aerosols represent 3.6 billion units. If everything was recycled empty, it would produce enough steel for more than 160,000 cars. Propular gases represent a technological platform which covers a wide variety of products: inhalers for asthma, cleaning products, insectures, deodorants, food products, disinfectants, paintings, extinguishers, razing creams, car maintenance products, Aviation and microelectronics. Personal care products consume most propellant gases, especially lacquers and mosses. However, food products, especially whipped cream, record a constant increase. On the other hand, the use of propellants gas in paintings and finishes is decreasing. Revenues generated by consumption aerosol products in the United States at wholesale prices reach around $ 15 billion and nearly $ 40 billion worldwide.

Innovation

The scarcity and cost of water oblige producers to use a lot of pesticides. In response, greenhouse design has evolved since the beginning of 2000 to a completely closed system - as well as building orders - allowing the farmer to completely control energy, humidity and productivity, reducing Thus his dependence on chemicals. Agriculture has evolved simultaneously towards hydroponics in an artificial substrate composed of sand, perlite, rock wool and volcanic gravel. This last option was already applied in the floating gardens of Aztecs. Earthstone Inc. (USA) now offers recycled glass, transformed into foam thanks to the injection of CO².

Charlie Paton, a British designer without experience in agriculture, observed during his frequent travel in Morocco an unproductive soil with the Atlantic on one side, and a vast desert on the other side. He sold his lighting company and devoted his life to the design and implementation of a simple and economical means of cultivating food in the desert using abundant salt water. Seawater is evaporated to create fresh and humid conditions inside. Part of the evaporated seawater is condensed in the form of fresh water to irrigate crops. The dry air of the desert which enters the greenhouse is then cooled and moistened by the seawater which runs on the first evaporator. When the air leaves the growth area, it goes through the second evaporator on which sea water flows. This water was heated by the sun in a network of pipes that make air hot and humid. When the hot and humid air reaches the cold surface, the fresh water condenses.

The fresh and humid conditions of the greenhouse allow crops to push with little water. When crops are not stressed by excessive sweating, yield and quality improve. The operating cost is a fraction of the material, financial and ecological cost of traditional greenhouses. It offers an opportunity for income in coastal areas around the world, which must now opt for reverse osmosis as the only access to drinking water for human consumption or agriculture. The system also works well in combination with the electricity production infrastructure, in particular when it is necessary to evacuate heat, as is the case for concentration solar power plants, using the residual heat produced for Increase fresh water production. This innovation does not consume fresh water, but produced instead of drinking water. This is a fine example of the principle of blue economy: using what you have, moving from rarity to abundance.

The first cash flow

Charlie then created Seawater Greenhouse Co. Ltd. And invested privately for more than 15 years in three pilot facilities to prove the concept: Ténérife, Canary Islands (Spain) in 1992, Al-Aryam Island, in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) in 2000, and near Mascate , in Oman, in cooperation with the Sultan Qaboos University in 2004. He only used the prevailing winds of the sea, fans and simple ready -to -use evaporators to convert sea water into fresh water and Thus create a wet environment in which almost all plants can push. At the end of 2009, Seawater Greenhouse finalized recapitalization with private investors and signed a first commercial project in South Augusta, Australia.

The opportunity

The potential to cultivate crops with simple inputs such as nutrients, the sun and sea water is enormous. It is now proven that it is viable to cultivate lettuce, tomatoes, a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers, and even to produce high quality sea salt in the desert. This profitable business model generates multiple income thanks to a simple process that imitates the hydrological cycle where seawater heated by the sun is evaporating, cools to form clouds and returns to the ground in the form of rain, fog or pink. This represents a huge platform for entrepreneurs around the world. There is an opportunity window to make it a consumer production system anywhere in the world since hydrological cycles can be imitated without restriction on all altitudes. And instead of working only with salt water, a variant of the same technological platform would make it possible to use contaminated water, by securing purification by the cycles of evaporation and condensation by exploiting the differences temperature and humidity. If we add to that the vortex technology of Curt Hallberg and his team at Watreco in Sweden, described in the first case, we see how the predictable results of physics can pass our hunger societies to sufficiency by using unusable land, ensuring profitable social and environmental development.