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Algae as a surprising meat alternative and source of environmentally friendly protein
(www.worldhealth.net)
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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One of the problems with large scale algae farming afaik is the algae getting contaminated by other algal species that are toxic and outcompete the edible algae. I'd like to see the solutions to that issue
I guess the production could take inspiration from the pharma industry and use strict increasingly clean zones and sterile environments the closer you get to the core production. After sterilising everything and sigeling out the alge you want you should in theory be able to run more or less indefinitely. And if a contamination of found it just a matter of sterilizing everything with steam and reboot the system.
Keeping things sterile is very labour and energy intensive, even in the Pharma industry, where the profit margins are orders of magnitude above what you can do in the food industry.
Look this will sound harsh, but it's not, really.
Your reasoning is good if you compare it to an hypothesis a student of Pasteur or Koch could have thought of 150 yrs ago.
Thus I have to ask you, why did you think you have a good take on this?
Did you read what i wrote? i said "take inspiration from" not "should copy 1:1 also i work i pharma so yes i have a good take on this.
When you're working with coproducts like algae-derived pharmaceuticals (see Lumen biotech in Seattle) that sell for 6 figures/kg you're correct, much more stringent pharma-like ideas do get implemented because the down time is costly. This is seen in indoor reactor setups where you can grow under artificial light year round. Outdoors, the cost to implement more sophisticated systems doesn't translate in your TEA especially when growing things like protein which is cheap in comparison.
It is a complicated topic, pest management strategies can vary. A lot of the time it is site and organism specific as far as what you'd end up with, certain species can be susceptible to different infestations. So many invasive organisms require different cures, these can include chemicals, fungicides, filtration, but these kinds of contamination events are somewhat expected after enough time, so as long as the same issue isn't recurring too frequently, the economic strategy is to just reboot the pond after a clean.
Typically, the strategy is to outcompete what you may get contaminated with. Ideally your crop is a high productivity strain of algae (much more productive than things originating outside the pond), and as long as the algae exhibit faster growth rates, the invasive species doesn't have an opportunity to take off as the desired algae will continue to take the majority of nutrients.
If you get something toxic in there, it's gotta be dealt with accutely based on the critter, but other preventative strategies like inlet media filtration/heating, crop rotation, and organism population monitoring can help mitigate these things from starting up. A good review can be found here.