This Monday in Design Factory I(Sasha) have found Konrad, Axel and Sakari. A day before we got letters from Aino and Nassib, so we have had new data to talk about. Absolutely fantastic amount of water needed for trees (80L/day/tree) was mentioned in a letter, and we took off talking of this one and not being able to match this number (for the reference, 1500 trees were planted recently on the Rock Village perimeter) needed for irrigation and permanent desire of planners to engage in using gray water (drain from household use) for irrigation. With the average consumption of 150L per day per capita (taken from the previous Aalto reports on situation on Lebanon), this will make very little sense. Later Maria El-Solh discredited 80L/day requirement, when asked via email. She claimed that currently the trees are fed by the rain and later will have to be irrigated twice a week during the summer. We still will be waiting to receive correct information on this.
Initial shock led us to a very interesting twist in our objectives. Previously we were looking into the small scale solutions orienting on the Phase 1 of development. Now this case gave us a new angle of vision. Phase-1-Living-sattlement is actually small, however Phase-1-Farming can be already quite significant. Therefore since now we have decided to treat them separately and have a reasonably simple take on the living matters, while considering potential crop farming in a larger scale.
We keep popularization of sustainable practices as a target desired by the client. From here and restrictions above topics we are looking into this week are as follows.
LIVING Phase 1
(objective: simple and cheap solutions that may seem attractive to other farmers)
Energy solution will, most likely, be a typical generator, what we would like to look into now, is whether it makes sense to install few solar panels on the building rooftops (Konrad). Current prices and technologies might make is quite possible and the benefit of those will be easy to convey to the neighbors.
Bio-gas mini-plant is a feasible suggestion (Sakari) and we will elaborate on numbers that it involve. At the moment the key questions here are: what kinds of cattle/farm-animals are there going to be, in which amounts and in which conditions. It makes big difference for the future of the plant whether there is one sheep or three, whether they are free-roaming in the field or kept indoors. For example, in case where animals spend day time roaming in the filed, overall productivity of the plant drops by 50%, which might make keeping it not any beneficial for the household.
Suggestion on personnel recruitment in the Rock Village development can be drawn at this moment (Sasha). For example, productivity of our work could have been a lot higher if we could communicate to a professional working with technical questions. It does not have to be a person working for the project full time, but someone aware enough of the case and having dedicated time to feed us with data. Quite many things become literally impossible in our work due to the lack of information on the case.
AGRICULTURE AND FARMING Phase 1
(objective: high yields, high quality product)
Obtaining independence on water resource is still a big topic, therefore we keep looking into options. We received a call saying that considering both rainwater collection and groundwater use is the optimal case. Suggestions for both will largely depend on the scale, now we will present everything we have in an upcoming mid-report (Vesa). To draw the assumptions on energy required for pumping the water we need to know where the water is pumped from, where does it go to and what are the heights characteristics of the landscape.
Estimates of required irrigation need for various crops can be done by Axel and Konrad as well. They will go for using UN FAO data and other similar resources available online to make plan on the book values.
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