In the west we have an abundance of food, and a lot of it goes to waste, not counting what your kids won’t eat for dinner but from my own farm we produce id estimate 10,000-15,000 tonne of fruit per year and about 100 tonne is not edible and we give to cows to eat to get rid of the waste, and another 200 tonne is only good enough for juicing. However that 100 tonne waste is enough to produce 90MW of power In a biogas generator. From a horticultural farm perspective this is great for 2 reasons.
1: if I have a 25kw biogas generator running at max production and you have it connected to a chiller, you’d produce 20kw of cold water, so you can run 45kw of refrigeration. If you’re after hot water it will produce an extra 32kw of heat
2: the final waste that comes out from the biodigester is fertiliser, making it more environmentally friendly because there’s less diesel machinery running and transport. This might not replace all fertiliser blends but should mean you need to buy less.
So how can Bitcoin mining in this manner secure food supply?
Let’s use the US electrical grid as an example. Big mining farms in the US have contracts to turn off miners when there’s a shortage in power, therefore helping increase supply because they are increasing production to match the extra demand of the miners.
So say you have a 40 ft shipping container, deck it out with grow lights, recycled drip fed irrigation so you re use 99% of the water over and over again, good ventilation and filters to stop air Bourne diseases and essentially create the best growing conditions and say for example grow carrots. If you do everything really tight you could grow 15-20MW worth of carrots, plant 10% every week and have a continuous 2MW every week for biogas. If there ever is a shortage on carrots or what ever food you grow, then you can fill that void and add your produce to the market instead of the bio digester.
I know people will say “that’s a waste of food” but adding it to an already saturated market is a waste and this way we gain it back as fertiliser and of course btc network hashrate.
So imagine all the big farms converting to biogas, I said 25kw because that’s what a company is doing for me but they do generators bigger than 1MW, you can run max load 24/7 for 4 months before it needs to be shut off for a service.
Just a Friday morning thought 