Given the cold hard facts that cotton production uses massive amounts of water, requires heavy use of pesticides and herbicides, depends on intensive farming practices which are devastating to the soil, AND is a constant threat to habitat and biodiversity because it needs fresh land regularly; I can see why you are scratching your head and wondering what I am on about. But fear not weary traveler, you have reached the inn, have fresh drink and food, and I intend to spin a tale that will help you rest easy.
Cotton can not only be produced without those drawbacks, it can even be grown in such a way as to solve other environmental problems. The method to this madness is through aquaponics.
Now before you run off yelling at the clouds about build out costs and inconsistent production and how cotton farmers aren’t interested in being fishmongers, please hear me out.
For starters, this aquaponic system isn’t a full on aquaponic system. While it will contribute to expansion of our healthy fisheries, we will not be producing fish or any other livestock in this system. This fact also does most of the heavily lifting for concerns about inconsistent production because the fish growth and feeding cycle will not affect nutrient flow to the plants. (the regular schedule of regional farming will, so nutrient flow will match plant needs closely). Finally, the buildout costs do exist, but over a relatively short period of time (slightly better than most industry construction ROI) they will be more than offset by savings from inputs that are no longer needed to produce said cotton.
Great, lets look at the mechanics of how we can make this happen.
To explain the process, I am going to start by pulling a word switch. We aren’t moving the goalposts here, but rather are bringing the focus of what we are doing in a little narrower. Remove aquaponics and replace it with refugium plant system. Yeah, in that form it doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily, but it does more accurately describe what we are doing since producing water based livestock is not a function of this system.
As we know, a refugium is a tank system for filtering pollution from aquariums. If we aren’t going to farm fish, where is the the aquarium? It is every river, stream, pond, or lake in the region we are working in. What we are going to be doing is pumping the nutrient polluted (thanks to farm and residential fertilizer run off) water from those natural systems, run it through our greenhouse refugium and grow room system, and return the clean water to its source.
This system is designed to maximize plant production against pollution levels and function with no additional inputs to plant production by channeling natural processes. Aquaponics lend themselves to pesticide free growth. Cotton is tolerant of other pollutants that we want it to take up from the water AND will not be consumed by man or beast, so is well suited to the task of removing these elements from the water. Best of all, this will release our land masses from the burden of hosting this destructive but very useful plant. I won’t go to deeply into the specific how’s here as we have published multiple articles (and will continue to do so) that serve that purpose, but if this concept has your attention, see the link below.
For more information on how to fix Dead Zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the mouth of other rivers, follow this link –>
