FLOATING FARM
Dutch dairy producer puts cows on water in urban business
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands — Peter van Wingerden’s dairy farm smells just like any other farm — the rich aroma of cow manure and grass hangs in the air. But the farm itself is far from traditional.
Moored in a small harbor in Rotterdam’s busy port, the farm is a futuristic threestory floating structure where one robot milks the cows and another automatically scoops up the manure. Its roof collects rainwater and a raft of solar panels floating alongside produces 40% of the energy the farm needs.
The cows, gazing out over ships transporting gas and yellow cranes unloading ships, eat a mixture of grass cut from a local golf course and the field used by Rotterdam’s top soccer team, grain used by a local brewer to make beer and potato peelings — all automatically cut, mixed and transported to food troughs by conveyer belts.
As countries around the world seek to meet the challenge of feeding growing populations in a sustainable way, Van Wingerden
believes the farm, which opened in May and cost about $3.4 million, demonstrates a new sustainable way of producing food close to where most of it is consumed — in the world’s cities.
“Transporting all this food all over the world is really polluting the world. It’s doing damage to food quality, it creates food losses,” he said. “So we have to find a different model. We have to bring it much closer to the citizens. And that’s what we’re showing over here.”
When the herd reaches its target capacity of 40 cows — there currently are 35 — it will produce 211 gallons of milk each day. The brown and white cows are a breed called Maas-rijn-ijssel — named for three rivers that flow through the Dutch region from where they originate.
The farm pasteurizes the milk and turns some of it into yogurt on the middle floor of the pontoon. Manure is processed for use as fertilizer.
Jan Willem van der Schans, a senior researcher at Wageningen Economic Research who specializes in urban farming, said floating farms could be the future for some sectors of agriculture such as fruit and vegetables. But he thinks that the level of automation and the unnatural surroundings of the cows could create opposition to the project.
“These are animals that we all like and then we like to see them in a meadow,” he said. “And then we bring them into a very industrial environment and I think that’s something that many people think is not the right direction for livestock farming to go.”
Van Wingerden said that animal welfare is his top priority, pointing to many design elements in the construction that are intended to make life as easy as possible for the cows such as rubber floors and poles in the stable.
The cows appear comfortable on the water. On a recent hot, sunny, day some lay in the shade, others stood, eating from the food troughs that overlook the busy Merwe Harbor, while others milled around the milking robot.
The pontoon rose and fell gently on undercurrents caused by the movement of nearby ships.
The movement didn’t appear to affect the cows.
“The cows are on four feet, so that helps a lot,” Van Wingerden said. “They don’t get seasick. They don’t get seasick at all.”