Nemo’s Garden – The Underwater Farm
The Idea
In the summer of 2012, Sergio Gamberini, founder of diving equipment firm Ocean Reef Group, was enjoying a seaside vacation on the Italian Riviera. Resting in between dives, he enjoyed strolling along the edge of the sea chatting with friends.
One day, the conversation veered to his other passion: gardening.
Would it be possible, he wondered, to create the perfect growing conditions for basil, the most popular local herb and an essential ingredient for pesto?
Like most herbs, basil prefers protected, sunny locations with well-drained soils and a constant, stable temperature.
Glancing at the sea, Gamberini was struck with an unusual idea: why not try to grow basil underwater? Bizarre as it might have seemed, the idea made perfect sense coming from a diving aficionado and innovation-minded entrepreneur. In fact, it would have allowed Mr. Gamberini to combine two of his passions: scuba diving and gardening. He made a couple of phone calls and, with the help of his team at Ocean Reef Group, started experimenting, sinking transparent biospheres 20 feet below the surface of the sea and filling them with air.
The Project’s Goal
The project’s goal was initially a provocation, but suddenly turned in something more ambitious:
Create an alternative system of agriculture, especially dedicated to those areas where environmental conditions, economical or morphologic reasons make plants growth extremely difficult.
Nemo’s Garden’s aims to create a system that utilizes natural resources already available, the foremost important one being the oceans and other bodies of water.
About Underwater Farming
The underwater system of agriculture could overlap the problematic issue of pesticides: the closed ecosystem created inside the biosphere is well preserved from the parasites attack. No use of pesticides means to have an ecological environment in strict contact with the seawater, thus avoiding any perturbation of the sea ecosystem.
Concerning fertilizers, actually a liquid product of natural origin is applied to different substrates or to the hydroponic system to supply one or more plant nutrients essential to the growth of plants.
Further investigations will be addressed to the possibility to produce fertilizers from algae found directly in the sea where the underwater farm will be installed. In this way a complete sustainability in the life cycle of growing plants would be attained, re-using the sea products as feed.
Improvements in water management for agriculture are one of key topic of Nemo’s Garden Project. Indeed, thanks to the difference of temperature between the air inside the biosphere and the seawater around the structure, the water at the bottom of the biosphere evaporates and easily condensates on the internal surfaces.
Since the underwater farm needs an external source of water only for the start-up of plants growing, our system could be useful for those locations far from the bodies of water available (i.e., seas, lakes, aquifers, etc.).
Any product that is difficult to grow in harsh environments would benefit from the alternative agriculture system proposed in the Nemo’s Garden Project. However, the limits of what can be grown are yet to be defined. Further researches will be addressed to understand the types of vegetables suitable for the underwater agriculture.
Or view the video on the server at:
https://video.tsemtulku.com/videos/NemosGarden.mp4
For more information, visit: http://www.nemosgarden.com/the-project/
Source: http://www.nemosgarden.com/the-project/
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Sergio makes the planting system into an open-source system for people who are interested. What he did was some sort of higher purpose of a human being to considerate one’s life. He does not care about how much money he can make through the system, what matter is the benefits of humanity.
As our resources are getting scarce and our environment is getting more polluted, we need to find new ways to fulfill our needs especially the food. We want to have chemical-free vegetables and at the same time using minimum energy or resources to produce. A guy called Sergio Gamberini has found a possible solution, under the sea!
Sometimes we have strange ideas coming to our mind. As crazy as it may sound, Sergio Gamberini suddenly has this idea of growing vegetables under the sea. When he has this idea, he didn’t think of making it big. But later it became a project to create an alternative system of agriculture, especially dedicated to those areas where environmental conditions, economical or morphologic reasons make plants growth extremely difficult.
Sergio is a very kind person, he did not want to keep the planting system design to himself to make money, he makes it into an open-source system for people who are interested to use it. He believes that sustainable alternative food resources is a global issue and he has the responsibility to help to solve the problem. When we take responsibility for the environment we are living in, we will find ways to contribute to make it a better place.
Wow!!!..this is a fantastic way to plant own vegetables and herbs like Nemo’s garden underwater farm. Can use underwater space instead of land which they can use to build buildings to live in. And it’s much healthier without using so much chemicals. More beneficial for healthy mind and soul. Hope we can also have this in Malaysia in the future. Thank you Rinpoche and blog team for sharing such an interesting and educational article.????☘️
Wow fantastic …….farming underwater. What a discovery by Sergio Gamberini, a chemical engineer, professional scuba diver and amateur gardener from Liguria, Italy . It was a matter of personal curiosity, and challenges with his friends he started the project the first fully functional underwater farm. He named the project as “Nemo’s Garden,” having own six underwater greenhouses and tested on a few vegetables before going into bigger scales of other plants. Up to date the greenhouse hosting about 700 plants including basil, tomatoes, salad, strawberries, aloe vera, mint, and few others. In the near future with this underwater farming , plants grown may unveil more interesting discoveries.
Thank you Rinpoche for this interesting sharing.
Nemo’s garden could help benefit us by saving space on land to plant and furthermore we could also decrease the number of using chemicals to prevent the soil to become acidic