This Italian farm sits 8 meters under the ocean

[boingboing]

Originally published at: This Italian farm sits 8 meters under the ocean | Boing Boing

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[Otherbrother]

The video says they have sensors to monitor temperature and humidity. Wouldn’t humidity be pretty stable at about 100%?

[anothernewbbaccount]

Seem rather fragile in the context of being close to a shoreline. What about tides and waves - especially in rougher weather?

[blackanvil]

I was hoping this would be something new about sea rice, but while an interesting idea, there doesn’t seem to be any way to make this commercially viable – too small, too vulnerable to waves, all your staff has to be SCUBA or freedive-certified (imagine the insurance costs!), plus shorter growing seasons and shorter daylight hours because it’s underwater, etc, etc. By using the evaporation/condensation cycle for watering I could see it maybe being viable in very arid regions, but honestly I think you’d be better off covering an air-conditioned greenhouse with those new transparent solar panels and going that route.

[Doctor_Faustus]

I’ve stood in one of the domes (not underwater, but in the rather excellent new German Museum branch in Nuremberg).

It certainly felt sturdy enough. Plus, the Mediterranean doesn’t really do tides.

[fuzzyfungus]

While it’s aesthetically very cool; it seems like pretty much the least-viable mechanism for achieving the objective in all other respects:

You do get your thermal stability more or less for free under 8 meters of seawater(barring locations with especially aggressive mixing due to local currents or something); but literally every other thing that terrestrial plants need you’ll do the hard and expensive way down there: BYO soil, fresh water, seeds; massively higher transportation costs; less light.

By contrast, team HVAC has plenty of ugly-but-functional-and-well-understood options for using a water supply to control temperature at comparatively modest energy costs; and every other aspect of plant growth becomes a lot less painful when you don’t need to build for 8 meters of potential saltwater intrusion.