RESILIENT PRODUCTION: Close The Loop!
Reslient, local production can reach amazing levels of capacity and efficiency by obsessively closing loops. ย How do you close loops? ย Simply:
- Turn the waste of one production process into the fuel/input required to operate another.
- Do that again and again and again until there is nothing left to reuse.
- All along the way, find ways to take the good parts out of each process. ย It could be food in one. ย Heating/cooling in another. ย Fresh water in a third.
For example. ย Let’s say you want to produce vegitables and fish. ย If you did it in a disconnected way, you would be hit with expenses (both monetary and time) at each step in the process. ย You would need to fertilize the plants. ย Feed the fish. ย Clean the water. ย It gets expensive early.
If you connected the production systems together, by closing the loops, you would have an aquaponics system. ย In an aquaponics system, the fish waste feeds bacteria which in turn produces fertilizer for the plants and fresh water for the fish. ย The food the plants produce generate excess that feeds the fish. ย With a tiny bit of automation and design, the entire thing operates seemlessly. ย Loop closed! ย The biggest chore is collecting the bounty.
Closing loops can turn problems into opportunties. ย Waste into bounty.