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Fast Coexist reports on the Edible Insect Desktop Hive, a kitchen gadget designed to raise mealworms (beetle larva), a food that has the protein content of beef without the environmental footprint. The hive can grow between 200 and 500 grams of mealworms a week, enough to replace traditional meat in four or five dishes.
The hive comes with a starter kit of "microlivestock," and controls the climate inside so the bugs have the right amount of fresh air and the right temperature to thrive. If you push a button, the mealworms pop out in a harvest drawer that chills them. You're supposed to pop them in the freezer, then fry them up or mix them into soup, smoothies, or bug-filled burgers. "Insects give us the opportunity to grow on small spaces, with few resources," says designer Katharina Unger, founder of Livin Farms, the company making the new home farming gadget. "A pig cannot easily be raised on your balcony, insects can. With their benefits, insects are one part of the solution to make currently inefficient industrial-scale production of meat obsolete."
Of course, that assumes people will be willing to eat them. Unger thinks bugs just need a little rebranding to succeed, and points out that other foods have overcome bad reputations in the past. "Even the potato, that is now a staple food, was once considered ugly and was given to pigs," says Unger adding that sushi, raw fish, and tofu were once considered obscure products. "Food is about perception and cultural associations. Within only a short time and the right measures, it can be rebranded. . . . Growing insects in our hive at home is our first measure to make insects a healthy and sustainable food for everyone."
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 20 2015, @09:16PM
I've gotten the kit from AlgaeLab [algaelab.org] a couple times and simply can't get the starter bottle to scale up. All the nutrients at the proper concentration, a PH tester to make sure the alkalinity is in the right range. I tried big translucent plastic containers, with an aquarium pump bubbling air through the mixture, but they all go yellow and die. I tried an automatic stirrer powered by an arduino and solar panels, same result.
The second time around I sprung for a full on glass aquarium with water heater to keep it at the optimal 80F, but that died even faster.
I thought maybe the lumens in the tanks were too high, or too low, and experimented with different placements and screens to control it, because everything seemed to instantly die in full sunlight. I thought I wasn't filtering the water enough (to remove any residual chlorine), so I double-filtered everything the second time around.
No luck. After two fresh restarts I have one last plastic container that seems to have become stable, but I can't seem to scale it up.
It's quite disappointing. Dunno, maybe I'll have to find a way to go somewhere and learn by workshop or something, or maybe I'll pack it in and build an aquaponic setup instead. There at least seem to be more online resources for the latter than the former.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by jdccdevel on Friday November 20 2015, @11:36PM
Maybe there is some residual waste product from the alge's metabolism that's poisoning it, because it can't dissipate fast enough? (volume vs surface area?)
Could be that large amounts of alge dying (and decaying) at the end of it's life cycle is poisoning the stuff that's stil alive.
Just a thought, it seems like you've thought of everything else.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 21 2015, @12:40PM
Yeah, I dunno. If it was a normal fish tank you'd run a filter to get the waste products out, but in this case that'd get rid of the algae you want to grow. You look at pictures of commercial algae ponds and they're open-air. You'd think that a controlled environment like an enclosed tank would be easier.
It has given me something of a complex. I can handle the regular kind of farming/gardening with weeds, insects, moles, mercurial weather, fungus, but this I can't master. If I can't handle hydroponics they're never gonna let me live on Mars...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by jdccdevel on Saturday November 21 2015, @06:41PM
Not really, the closed environment has to maintain a perfect balance. In an open environment, waste products have somewhere to dissipate to. In a closed environment, they accumulate, and eventually kill.
It might be worthwhile to monitor the CO2 and O2 levels in the atmosphere around your algae tank if you can, since it sounds like you're using a enclosed tank. I suspect your algae is suffocating.
I guess that depends, how good are you at growing potatoes? ;-)