Renaissance man tackles the food crisis with heated greenhouses

Given Anthropogenic Climate Disruption and our dwindling capacities for producing enough healthy food, a cutting-edge farming technique that dramatically increases produce yields from a design engineer in Port Townsend, Washington, may well already be filling a critical void.

Billions of people already lack adequate supplies of potable water on a daily basis, and by 2030, nearly half the world's population will live in "water-stressed" areas, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Environmental Outlook 2030 Report.

The corporate answer to the food crisis has been to introduce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in an effort to expand crop sizes and yields. The outcomes and implications of this, however, continue to prove detrimental to both the environment and human health.

However, on a local level, scientist Joe Breskin seems to have found a solution for dramatically increasing vegetable yields in greenhouses, doubling the length of growing seasons and feeding more people for less money - all while using cutting-edge energy efficiency techniques.

"Heated greenhouses are not new, but the way we are doing it is," said Breskin, who describes himself as a "senior generalist, engineering design consultant" who likes to "fix complex, interesting things that don't work."

Utilizing excess heat generated by fans circulating air through a greenhouse, Breskin's system uses hot metal coils within a massive water tank to heat water, which is then piped underneath vegetable beds, where more heat translates directly into larger, tastier, more abundant produce."The idea is to capture high-value heat and use it for the plants, rather than throwing it into the atmosphere," Breskin told Truthout. "I had to figure out how to do all this. This is an invention."

Click here to read the complete article at truth-out.org