When Jimmy Carbone, co-creator of The Good Beer Seal, was considering running for mayor of his old hometown in Haverhill, Massachusetts, he began to ponder possible new uses for industrial buildings that had fallen in to disuse. Could small resource-sharing breweries be a centerpiece of a regional economic development? To find out, he asked his peers in craft brewing, green building, engineering, and microbial science for advice. This intriguing discussion continues at an event at Brooklyn Brewery [pic above] on 19 July called Shoe Town to Brew Town.
The environmental impacts of brewing are significant. They are energy intensive operations and use lots of water. By the same token, many brewing ‘wastes’ have the potential to be re-used as raw materials in another product or process. Fermentation lends itself to the production of biogas or methane, for example; breweries could be a modest power centers for the local industrial ecology. The New Belgium Brewery in Colorado uses 40 percent less energy per barrel of output than the average American brewer because, from hops in to beer out, every stage of the firm’s brewing process has been designed for greater efficiency and the re-use of waste.
Brewing wastes can also enrich food chains. The mash leftover from fermenting process, which is microbially rich, can be fed to pigs, or fish [such as perch) or oysters and mussels. Sweet Water Organics in Milwaukee, for example, is not a brewery but it does occupy a once abandoned warehouse in which one floor now houses aquaponic systems for growing Perch, and another floor is used to grow greens.
‘Shoe Town to Brew Town’ is July 19, 7:30-10:00 PM Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tickets are $40 per person [mainly because this is a benefit event for the Gaia Institute].
Second menu
Geeked-out gardening
The day after I celebrated his Kickstarter success with Tyler Caruso, co-founder of Seeing Green, which is about measuring the value of urban agriculture, I read a fascinating piece by Simon Kuper in the FT about the use of data to analyse every tiny aspect of a football match..
‘Largely unseen by public and media, data on players have begun driving clubs’ decisions’, Kuper writes, ‘particularly decisions about which players to buy and sell’. Chelsea’s performance director, for example, has amassed 32 million data points over 13,000 games. At other clubs, too, obscure statisticians in back-rooms will help shape this summer’s player transfer market. Just as baseball has turned into more of a science, Kuper concludes, soccer will too.
This prompted me to wonder: Could statistics and data-mining come to dominate food growing, too?
My curiosity was further piqued when I hard about a ‘computer that runs your garden’ also known as an Automated Garden Facility (AGF) also known as Garduino.
The idea of Garduino, which is built on the Arduino platform, is to monitor the garden environment in real time and use that information to water plants when they’re thirsty, turn on supplemental lights when the sun’s not bright enough, and alert you when temperatures are uncomfortably chilly for plants. What’s up-and-running so far is a pilot application that measures the water status of a plant where the information is collected by an NSLU2 mini linux server.
Garduino is pretty cool, but I can’t help worrying that its ambitions are too narrowly-focused. It’s spec surely needs to include the thorny issue of Measuring What Matters [MWM tm].
The picture below, for example, is a close-up of my tomato beds here in France. What you see is a tomato plant, doing OK, and two other plants, also doing OK, that were formerly known as weeds.
One problem with Garduino is that the conditions it measures and regulates are exactly the same for tomatoes, as they are for the ‘weeds’. To complicate matters further, some ‘weeds’ are more beneficial to the local ecosystem than others – or so one learns from permaculture. You need to know which ones bring which benefit, or not, in order to decide which ones to ‘weed’ – that is, kill – or not.
Although Garduino is resolutely bottom-up and open source, and stands in cultural opposition to the monopolistic and evil tendencies of agribusiness, I’m not sure how diferent it is, in kind, from Accenture’s 2004 Pickberry Vineyard project. Then, a wireless mesh of networked sensors was deployed over a 30-acre premium vineyard. Is Garduino not a child of the same control-seeking mentality?
The answer is probably yes and no. My intutition is that *some* Garduino-like platforms will be needed as we make the transition to resilient food systems in all their complexity and diversity. How much tech, and what kinds, and who will use and own and control them, need to be discussed as we go along. We’ll need evidence and data, not just arguments, to get the attention of wavering policy makers.
The last time we discussed appropriate technology widely was during the 1970s when we’d barely thought about, let alone deployed, the internet, sensors, wifi, or an internet of things. Today’s new times are like the 1970s, only different: It fels like a good moment to revisit and reframe the app-tech debate.