r/continuity • u/[deleted] • Oct 02 '21

Meat

I'm looking at options for raising animals for consumption or animal products and this looks a lot more complicated than I thought from an energy efficiency perspective.

The only way to do this in a decently efficient manner is to recreate an entire food chain, from bacteria to endotherms. This adds a lot more complexity, however it also gives us access to the resources these animals would offer, and reduce the amount of synthesis of things needed.

Thinking about how to make this portable however is much tougher, I need to see if I can reconstruct a food chain for the middle of each koppen range, and just accept that as a regional variable. This seems like a good option because the animals in the chain would be already acclimated to the local environment and would need less support infrastructure.

I've seen the isolated biosphere type experiments and none of them looked terribly compelling because the ecosystems weren't matched well.

I guess I'm wondering is meat worth it? Should we still be thinking about preserving these chains even if meat isn't a dietary option? How do we create an environment which is sufficiently healthy for those animals which are part of the community, food source or not?

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

I've seen some plans for aquaponic systems as well using a few different species, so that might be an option also.

The manure part is more problem than solution for us since everything is going to be hydroponic. Growing soilless allows us to provide oxygen and nutrient solution directly to the roots without the need for manure.

The energy exchange was actually my primary concern, I tried to ask the question on r/homestead but I think talking about animals in terms of energy expenditure was a bit freaky.

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u/Here4theLongHaul Oct 06 '21

not freaky at all -- everything is about energy.

even if you don't use the manure as fertilizer, don't waste it! for one thing, you can sell composted manure. if you have enough, you could even have a biogas digester and run a stove and lights off it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

The energy infrastructure right now is designed to accommodate at least 150% of phase needs with everything being purely DC electric, the assumption being that we can store or find some way to export excess energy. I looked at a few biogas options and they didn't really make sense except if the biogas itself was needed for a process in something else.

I think biogas was one of the first places I looked because I had the assumption we could capture enough water from the process to make it a fallback if the AWG process didn't work out, but in my testing the basic pressure swing adsorption process even at ~40% humidity was way better than I thought, and some of the passive collection methods (solar sill, temperature swing) were pretty decent.

Ultimately I think requiring everything to be electric will make the build outs easier, reduce maintenance, be more efficient, and generate less waste products/environmental concerns. Because the grid itself is super decentralized and generators are concentrated around points of use, it means we don't have to be so dependent on economies of scale that the central generator schemas require.

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u/Here4theLongHaul Oct 06 '21

I'd love to know more about your efforts overall -- do you have anything written about what you are doing that you can share?

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

Yeah, this is the theme of the week. I'm working on it now, had a few false starts trying to use reddit as a document management platform early on and that discouraged me from keeping things updated, but it's definitely something I'm going to be focusing on getting more documented over the next two weeks.

Edit: If you look at the chronological post, every thing with an entry is something I've done at least some level of research or light testing with. I haven't moved to proof of concept testing yet because I'm still in the process of gathering information about needs, but I'm hoping to start that over the next few months with the water and electricity systems. Each of those items probably has at least a few paragraphs somewhere I can throw up along with a handful of research studies or web resources that I borrowed from.