Biosphere 3 -Day 3 Food Production continued Tahoma Jr. High 8 th Grade Science Maple Valley, WA Where’s all the food on your daily menu going to come from??

BASIC “RULE OF THUMB” if food is a tree crop – only ONE crop per year = 1 crop per year = 2 crops per year if food comes from ground crops – you can get TWO crops per year

Let’s say that you are going to have one apple per person per day. Three people in the group = three apples per day. Since apples are only produced once a year, that means you need to grow at least 1,095 apples (3 x 365). Now you’ll need to research how many average apples (or their weight/volume) is produced by 1 tree (or acre and then how many trees would fit in that acres). There are going to be LOTS of conversions going on during this project. Then have enough space and water for that many trees to make those 1,095 apples. Finally, you need a way to store the apples for at least 10 months (they won’t last more than 2 months without some “preserving” done).

How about having some chicken for dinner? What if your group is going to split one chicken between you each day? How long is it going to take to replace that chicken? What is it going to take to grow that chicken? What are you going to do with any parts that you DON’T eat – or the chicken’s wastes? RESEARCH IT !!

After researching chickens for food, there are two types of chickens: layers (eggs) and broilers (meat). These types have been bred to produce the most of one thing – either eggs or meat.

In the real farmer’s world, you would want to maximize their productivity of EITHER eggs or meat. But in your biosphere, you want to make things simple – so why not get eggs AND meat from the chickens when they get older (like wool from sheep until they’re old and then you get mutton from them). But you STILL have to REGULARLY REPLACE THEM !

For chickens, research ideas would be: 1. how many eggs do you get from a chicken in how much time? 2. how many “servings” of meat come from a chicken? 3. how long does it take to grow to adult after hatching? 4. how much food/water does it need? 5. how much space does it need? 6. what can be done with leftover parts? 7. how do they get processed/stored?

The most important part of all this is: HOW MANY CHICKENS ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE IN YOUR BIOSPHERE AT ANY ONE TIME? Well - if you eat one chicken per day, and it takes a while to grow a replacement, you are going to need a LOT of chickens around at different levels of growth so one is ready to eat tomorrow – and the day after – and the day after that... and they all need water, food, space… OBVIOUSLY – A LOT MORE THAN JUST THREE !

How about wheat? Farmers are sometimes able to get more than one crop per year, especially if you can control the “seasons” in each biome (like Biosphere 2). Here’s an example of some calculations you will do: science is numbers, so it would have been a good idea to have a solid math person on your team, eh?!

From the resources given in class, you find that you can grow 4,284 pounds of wheat per acre. Your team figures out that animals (including you) will be eating 10 pounds per day.

If it takes 180 days to grow a crop – during that “growing time”, you will eat 1,800 pounds (10 lbs per day x 180 days). Therefore, you will need to grow 0.42 acres of wheat (1,800 lbs used / 4,284lbs per acre) Don’t forget processing and storage! Then you can start a 2 nd crop ( while you use what’s stored ). what’s this building? a storage silo

This is ALL the water needed to produce these items from start to finish. Your needs don’t need to be this precise, we’re going to figure 1 gallon per m 2 of crop land. 1 latte = 55 gallons 1 glass milk = 53 gallons 1 glass beer = 20 gallons 1 glass O.J. = 45 gallons 1 egg = 53 gallons 1 burger = 630 gallons 1 apple = 16 gallons 2lbs cotton cloth = 2,900 gallons Not only is agriculture the world’s largest industry, it accounts for 69% of all freshwater used by people on the planet.

Now you see why we told you to keep things SIMPLE. There is a LOT that goes into making all the food on your menu – and we take that for granted when we get our “processed” food from Safeway. Once you have the basic menu completely done, if you want to add some “substitutions” in to impress graders, you can do so, but realize how much impact that new “option” has on your biosphere! There are many ripple effects to every change made… end show