Oyster production low because they are fouling/destruction of oyster rafts (by external forces, i.e. typhoon), extreme hardship of the labour.
The problems being addressed by the design proposal is the extreme hardship of the oyster farming, the risk of the oyster batch fouling due to the oysters clumping together and defacing on one another as well as the risk of loosing the entire batch oysters due to storms and typhoons. question/s is your design investigating?
How can the production improved, the fouling, contraction of diseases be minimised and the labour made more bearable.
By introducing a flip-farm system, the oyster farming could be made more productive, i.e. more and healthier oysters, the risk of the batch being lost to weather conditions can me minimised by the modularity of the system.
Research Log
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- What is it? What does it do?
- The design proposal is a fusion between the “flip farm” – mostly modular floating structures that each house one oyster cage that can be flipped around to decrease the mortality of the oysters and increase their growth – and submerged clusters made out of rope and concrete-disks that are coated with clay and pulverised oysters that can attract new healthy oyster seed.
- The project entails the design of the floatable oyster cage, a structure that enables the turning and harvesting of the cages as well as a proposal for spat collection units.
- What are the questions this work is asking? What new knowledge are you creating?
- The combination of spat growing and oyster farming aims to return the means of productions of oyster farming to the farmers and enabling them to fully control the growing process as well as to reinvigorate the knowledge about how to grow new seed that seems to vanish because the oyster farmers tend to buy the seed from external sources, because the process of seed growing with concrete poles seems to have become too tedious.
- How are you going to test your assumptions?
- The design will be tested by reconstructing the flipping mechanism in a 1:50 physical model.
- How to maintain your device?
- The operation of the facility requires minimum two persons which have to flip the farms each day by using the structure attached to the boat. In addition to this, the oysters should be monitored each week to control the outspreading of diseases or oyster fouling.
- What do you think are the strongest and the weakest points in your project now?
- The strongest point is the enhancing of the resilience of the oyster industry by enabling the farmers to economically and with reduced strain to their personal health continue the tradition of oyster farming, while giving them the opportunity back to create their own seeds. The weakest point is that such an endeavour would require a large amount of funds and that the introduction of this new way of farming could lead to the vanishing of the traditional way of oyster farming and could lead to a larger competition among the farmers. Furthermore the project does not solve the bad image the Hong Kong Oyster has, because people do not trust the water quality of the waters in the Hong Kong Deep Bay.
- What construction technique are you using?
- The cages are sized so that they can be easily lifted, therefore the choice of the material aims to be towards longevity and recyclability. The cages could be composed of a UV-resistant pure plastic, that does not contain additives that could leek into the water. Due to the exposure of the cages to both UV-light and saline water, using biodegradable plastic does not seem like a very viable option. The parts are not complex and can be assembled on site, for the oyster cage the assembly only includes the attaching of the floating body to the cage and then to the connecting element that connects the cages and enables them to flip. The structure that is required for flipping would have to be attached to a boat, requiring a certain amount of expertise. The materials used for the cages could be recycled, if they are destroyed, although their lifespan should be rather long. The materials used for the spat collector are concrete, clay and ground oyster shells, they are widely available around the site and inexpensive. The most complexity arises from the casting of the disks, a mould, which would be made out of a reusable silicone, has to be created.
- Who uses it? Can you draw a particular user? Can you describe to me that user, how they look, your assumption on their backgrounds, abilities, preferences, and what drives them?
- The users are the actual oyster farmers, which at this point although physically fit, have to endure the hard work of tending to their oyster cages, which are mostly situated on floating platforms, which means that the cages, which are rather heavy, have to be lifted out of the water and then on to a boat. What drives them is the upholding of the oyster farming tradition in the Hong Kong Deep Bay as well as their own survival.
- What are the benefits users can get from the device?
- The benefits for the farmers are mainly the reduced strain on their body while handling the oysters, the improved oyster yield, as well as the economical benefit of being able to produce healthier and better oysters by controlling the spat growing and the improved way of growing the oysters.
- What problems does your design cause?
- One of the mayor problems is the question whether the new method would cause a divide within the community of the oyster growers.
- How do you operate and maintain this installation?
- It can be operated from a boat, requiring two persons to handle the respective cages and one person to steer the vessel, its maintenance should be relatively easy, although the structures attached to the boats would need to be controlled regularly because they are under quite a lot of stress.
- How do people get on board?
- The farmers would board the boat from the harbour, but the structure can not be walked upon.
- How much weight can you carry?
- The floating cages should be able to carry the oyster load which should be between 20 and 30 kg to enable the farmers to pick them up.
- How to maximise efficiency and convenience for the user
- A maximisation of the efficiency of the process could be reached by thinking about how the oysters are stored on board of the ship and how they are being transported from there to the further processing.
- Are there simpler ways to achieve the objective?
- In my opinion, the method of flip farming seems to be as simple and effective as possible, but the method with which the oysters are collected can be optimised.
- Are there other possible use for clean seawater filtered by oysters?
- A side objective of the design is to have more oysters in the water, which would clean the ocean water, but in this case there are no other uses for the cleaned seawater.
- How long will it be in the water?
- Redundant, because the farms would be in the water at all time.
- Is it stable? Safe? ship survivability？
- The modules are compact and easy to be shipped, their stability, also during a typhoon, is higher than the traditional rafts.
- Is the device safe and environmental friendly to the ocean
- It is certainly safe to the point where the plastic that the cages are made of does not break and flow into the ocean.
- What is the scale and materials? Where and how is it built? Where do the materials come from? Where do the materials go after it’s used/broken?
- The cages are sized so that they can be easily lifted, therefore the choice of the material aims to be towards longevity and recyclability. The cages could be composed of a UV-resistant pure plastic, that does not contain additives that could leek into the water. Due to the exposure of the cages to both UV-light and saline water, using biodegradable plastic does not seem like a very viable option. The parts are not complex and can be assembled on site, for the oyster cage the assembly only includes the attaching of the floating body to the cage and then to the connecting element that connects the cages and enables them to flip. The structure that is required for flipping would have to be attached to a boat, requiring a certain amount of expertise. The materials used for the cages could be recycled, if they are destroyed, although their lifespan should be rather long. The materials used for the spat collector are concrete, clay and ground oyster shells, they are widely available around the site and inexpensive. The most complexity arises from the casting of the disks, a mould, which would be made out of a reusable silicone, has to be created.
- What materials would you use? Where do you source it? Once used, where does it go?
- is it recyclable？
- The oyster cages are recyclable, but the attached structure to the boat is harder to recycle and the concrete disks could only be recycled by crushing them and using the crushed concrete for road building etc.
- How long does the project take to be complete: build, bring on site and board?
- The assembly could be done within a three days, most time consuming would be the attaching of the boat structure
- How to mass produce the device?
- The cages can easily be mass produced, as well as the concrete disks.
- Where does the installation get its energy from?
- The only thing requiring energy is the boat that carries the farmers, which could possibly be sourced from solar panels
- Is it sustainable and how?
- It is sustainable, both socially, economically and ecologically. Because it enables the farmers to control the oyster growing process completely, because it enables the growing of more and healthy oysters, which contributes to the water quality and the profitability for the farmers, while ensuring that the weather conditions do not harm the oysters.
- Is your installation amicable to all marine lives?
- It would be even more amicable than the rafts, which, begin made mostly out of bamboo, create fouling, which removes oxygen from the water.
- How does it work? Especially the biology of it?
- The flipping of the cages, which are halfway submerged, mimics the submersion of the oysters when exposed to the natural tidal movements. By flipping the oysters within the cage, they are forced to stay separated from one another, giving less space for malicious organisms to grow in, and reducing the risk of the oyster fouling in their larger clusters.
- Which other species will naturally be attracted to the oyster reef there, such as crabs, fish, mussels, algae and other species?
- The spat collectors could be used to attract other organisms, but generally, the structure would focus on oysters.
- Where do you think this installation would be? Choose a very specific site in Hong Kong waters. Why there? Tell me the characteristics of the place: water depth, tide, current, wave, closest port, fauna and flora, people and industries nearby.
- The site would be the oyster growing fields (on the water) in Lau Fau Shan, because the space has been traditionally used for oyster farming and it is already near the market, where the oysters are further processed.
- Will it be influenced by the weather condition?
- One of the advances of the modular way of tying the cages to one another is that the tides as well as the wind and rain do not harm the structure, it adapts to the wave movement because it is fragmented and does not have a large surface that could cause it to rip apart during strong winds.
- Does your device perform differently when in different geographic environments(for instance, near shore, in shallow water, and in distant seawater)?
- It dies not.
- Is it cost-effective?
- It is cost-effective as far as I am aware of.
- Is it possible to be mass-produced?
- Yes
- What is the product / outcome of this installation? Who benefits from it? What is the business model of this?
- The product of the design is the reduction of labour intensity for the farmers, oysters as well as healthy oyster seeds.