September 10, 2018

World’s first floating farm to open in Rotterdam

Filed under: Animals,Dutch first,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 10:30 am

The world’s first ‘floating dairy farm’ will open its doors in Rotterdam’s Merwehaven port this year, built by Dutch property company Beladon. It will feature 40 Meuse-Rhine-Issel cows (brown spotted, so not the Frisian cows in the picture), milked by robots.

The sustainability idea behind the project is that there is less and less good ground to produce food, while the world population continues to grow and demand more from their food. Built-up urban areas don’t exactly seem like the most sensible places to run farms, but reducing the distance food travels before it reaches consumers’ plates makes environmental sense as it reduces transport pollution.

The Floating Farm intends to produce fresh milk and healthy products, as well as provide tours, education and research.

(Links: bbc.com, floatingfarm.nl)

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March 6, 2013

Taking the guesswork out of expiration dates

Filed under: Food & Drink,Science,Technology by Orangemaster @ 6:34 pm

Expiration dates on food are just a guideline. Sometimes, things like milk are bad from the get-go, while tinned products seem to last for years. However, we don’t really know, as most of us make sure nothing green is growing on our food or sniff it to make sure it smells alright.

But wouldn’t it be great to have the guesswork taken out of the equation? The Eindhoven University of Technology is working on doing just that using a plastic analogue-digital converter, or plastic chip. The cost of having these chips on food are less than a euro cent and could also be used for other expiration date sensitive goods such as medicine.

One of the researchers on this project says food can be monitored already using standard silicon chips, but that is too expensive, about 10 euro cent, which is too much for a one euro item. That is why they are using plastic, as the chips can be applied directly to packaging. And apparently, the chips use some very complex mathematics to make sure they work properly.

(Link: opmerkelijk.nieuws.nl, Photo of Orange juice – expiration date by viZZZual.com, some rights reserved)

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