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Rondout past and future
This work does not constitute an exhaustive or direct set of procedures, but points the way to developing your own plans for resilient small ports. No part of this publication can be used directly without adaptation to local circumstances, and does not constitute legal, business, investment, or financial advice.
Rondout Riverport 2040 proposes a pragmatic and prosperous vision for the near future with a transformed port, boasting a shore lined with leading-edge and heritage maritime commerce that profit and engage while allowing for an equitable transition beyond fossil fuels.
Rondout Riverport will offer more capacity, be significantly more compact, and more resilient than the current patchwork of land uses found on today’s waterfront. The mission of tomorrow’s port is the post carbon maritime transport of goods and people up and down the Hudson River and beyond. Riverport is designed to attract shipping, distribution, commerce, food processing, and craft businesses. The result: a regenerative working waterfront — a gateway to the Hudson Valley and world.
The port’s versatility will depend on the linking of its economic opportunities with environmental restoration, sustainable commerce, and training centers. This multi-generational project will also be a source of inspiration for broader long-term action on climate change.
The Hudson River Maritime Museum, in cooperation with the Center for Post Carbon Logistics and the Northeast Grainshed Alliance, will be conducting a Grain Race in May of 2022. Contestants in four capacity categories will vie for the highest score when moving cargoes of grain from growers to producers and users such as brewers and maltsters across New England, New York, and New Jersey. Each Ton-Mile of cargo moved earns one point, but 5 points are lost for each liter of fuel, or 10 kWh of power taken from the grid.
Based on the Great Grain and Tea Races of the 19th century, conducted by ships sailing from Australia and China to England, but adapted to facing the current climate crisis, this race is designed to add some drama and interest to the topics of local food systems and food transportation.
Each contestant set can enter a single cargo voyage during the month of May 2022, using the indicated Google Form, which will be verified by a panel of judges. Winners will be published on the 15th of June, and prizes awarded thereafter.
The rules and current Directory of Participants and Supporting Organizations can be accessed here. Those interested in participating can have themselves added to the directory through the provided contact link in the document, while those with questions can contact the Hudson River Maritime Museum for further information.
Blog Post
The Northeast Grain Race is many things, a history lesson, an “all things considered” invitation, a competition and an opportunity to make a difference but it also highlights another race – a race against time. The world urgently needs initiatives like this to make us sit up and take a good look at what we all take for granted – the food in our local store and how it gets there. To put it bluntly, we must find better ways to put food on the table without destroying the farms that grow it, and recent disasters are surely stark reminders that we’re rapidly running out of time. The good news is this is a race we can win, we can come out on top if we apply ourselves to this, The Race Of Our Lives. In our marine team, we have access to the best of history, the best technology and the combined expertise of the best Maritime Minds and Lateral Thinkers so the odds are good – we can win this one!
This race could herald a new era as the seeds of a new ocean order come to fruition – history will be written. ) we are evolving to a point where we will wield real power. Power to initiate sensible change as we jointly reject the old obsolete ways of the past and embrace the new ways of the past – the abundant natural capital of wind and sun re-interpreted for the 21st century.
The power to commission a new generation of better cargo ships, clean, efficient and profitable ships driven by wind and sun, is within our grasp. Our time is now.
As an Australian member of this group of visionary minds, my own contribution is both modest yet my aims are global. The principles are simple – take the best of the old and press a big refresh button. Our small sailing ketches and cargo schooners would not, at first glance, look out of place moored to a 19th century wharf, but look closer and you will see that every single component of every one of our boats is upgraded. We’ll refine the time-honoured sailplans, upgrade all the gear and build in electric auxiliaries. A new generation of sailmakers will weave their composite spells, new alloys like Scandium will be extruded for our spars and our underwater lines will cleave the waters with no oily scum in their wake.
Every aspect of the power delivery systems is designed for efficiency. Form Energy’s new generation iron-air batteries show great promise as ballast with benefits, new pumps and fridge compressors will cut power consumption by half – Magtor take a bow, and hats off to the Alpha 311 creators for their innovative roadside wind generators, we have designated spaces for them on board. There’s high-performance, self-lubricating bearings for props, rudders and dagger boards. All this and up to 36 TEUs in the holds, that’s 800 tonnes or 1,400 cubic metres (49,440 cubic feet) in our new Schooner. Food on the table without trashing the trade routes.
Our new wind ships are freighters, feeders and short sea traders with a good attitude, not afraid to exploit the best of the new but built on the solid, risk-averse foundations of the world’s maritime history, a history with a particularly rich vein running right through the North Eastern States
This business model only takes us so far however, you are not going to power a full-sized container ship with solar panels over the cargo hatches but our C100 Ketch will generate 12kW on a good day and power the inboard electric engines in the calms to help keep the owner’s accountant happy. And there’s the business case in a nutshell – free fuel, there for the harnessing. I’ll gladly leave the development of the mega ships to those best qualified for the job but America and indeed the whole planet will always need small ships, new generation zero-carbon square riggers for the trade winds and new schooners, sailing barges and cutters for the rivers, estuaries and islands.
So what’s the big idea then? Where do we go from here?
Back to future I say, and I take my cue from the amazing World War 2 Liberty Ship program initiated by good old-fashioned US entrepreneurs and an enlightened government applying Henry Ford’s mass-production techniques to the slipways. The current war threatens annihilation so we’d better get down to it. We need mass-produced sail and sun driven ships by the thousand. We will need the discipline and strategy of the military, the precision of robotics and the hard work of the Nation’s best shipwrights and we need them now.
So what’s stopping us? Capital. Where there’s a will there’s a way and we have the will already. We need to pool our abundant resources, take a collective deep breath and speak up – loud and clear. It’s no longer a case of “THEY SHOULD DO SOMETHING!” Protest is past, action is present, WE will do something, our voices must ring out in the boardrooms of the powerful. The message is crystal clear, free fuel can no longer be ignored and the starting gun for the future-proof shipping race has already been fired – the winds of change are here!
The author:
Derek Ellard is an Australian boat builder and designer at Go Sail Cargo. He has designed “purpose built” “electric clipper” sail cargo vessels ranging in size from 24’ to 180’. Derek has been working with the Center for Post Carbon Logistics, The Schooner Apollonia, the Hudson River Maritime Museum, and Sustainable Hudson Valley as part of an effort to R&D. design, finance, and build 5 new ships including an ocean-going sail cargo vessel to be locally built in a Hudson Valley shipyard to complement the movement of goods and people to and from the Caribbean, New York Harbor, and the Hudson Valley in a carbon constrained future. Derek can be reached at derek@scruffie.com.
A Blog Post by Steven Woods. Mr. Woods earned his master’s degree in Resilient and Sustainable Communities at Prescott College in 2021, with an undergraduate degree in History from LeMoyne College. He has worked in museums for over 20 years and is making a career transition to the sustainability field after 6 years in the US Airforce. He is presently the Solaris Coordinator at the Hudson River Maritime Museum.
I’m willing to bet a lot of people clicked this article thinking something along the lines of “How about ‘Towards Hiring A Proofreader, Eh?!’” Despite this, the title is accurate: The Food Movement lacks any real vision of how food will move in future from the farm gate to the citizen’s fridge. I am very much talking about a social movement concerned with the physical movement of food.
We could also call such a movement by other names: “Tucker Transit To-Do,” “Respect For Refreshment Relocation,” “Comestible Conduct Concern,” “Victual Voyage Verification,” and “The Food Flow Front” were all suggested to friends before I was summarily kicked out of their house. While “Whence The Vittles?!” was a personal favorite, it seems these are mostly just good ways to make enemies and alienate people while not getting your point across in a helpful way. Thus, we are left with the boring but utilitarian name of The Food Movement Movement.
There are a lot of studies out there about regional food self sufficiency, some dating from the 19th century, and others from just a few years ago. The topic of food sovereignty has been a matter of debate since the 17th century, and usually comes to the fore during and after armed conflicts and other crises which might result in embargos or other interruptions to the food supply, such as Brexit quite recently. Agriculture and food security have long been considered matters of national security and tools of foreign policy, and in war many blockades specifically target food movement into and within enemy nations as a way of inflicting losses and destroying the enemy’s will to continue the conflict..
Far fewer studies actually touch upon how food is supposed to move between its points of origin and consumption within a peacetime food system model. Even fewer touch upon how this can be done at the necessary scale in a post-carbon future.
How food was, is, or will need to be carried over land and sea through the use of self-propelled vehicles, trailers, barges, carts, pack animals, ships, or human powered systems such as bicycles is chronically under studied. A great historical study of this overlooked element of food systems is Walter Hedden’s book “How great cities are fed” from 1929. Without this transportation, food goes to waste and people starve. It is simply impossible for New Englanders to eat food which is sitting in crates on a Texas, Florida, Kansas, or California farm table for lack of transportation capacity. As a result, it is difficult to overcomplicate or underestimate the impact of insufficient transport capabilities on any socio-alimentary system.
New York City Foodshed
With a carbon-constrained future rapidly approaching and demanding significant changes to transportation habits, this issue is of paramount importance. Unfortunately, it is routinely ignored in food system visions, which are normally published without direct and detailed attention to the distance and means by which food will be transported. Take New England, for example: A New England Food Vision by Food Solutions New England hopes to expand agriculture so half of New England’s food is produced within the region by 2060. While laudable and achievable, this publication doesn’t tell us how literally tens of thousands of tons of food per day will arrive in New England from elsewhere, all year round. The study simply assumes there are sufficient transport resources which are independent of petroleum fuel supplies, will not raise the cost of imported food beyond the reach of citizens, and doesn’t rely on similarly vulnerable, scarce, and unpredictable renewable electricity sources. It also expects petroleum-based paved infrastructure, tires, and other supplies underpinning our current transportation system to continue existing in sufficiently decent condition to carry these millions of daily ton-miles across the region and the continent.
None of this should be taken for granted, but it is easy to understand why it is forgotten in our current economy and era of easy access to energy. With cheap fossil fuels, low shipping costs, and a probably misplaced faith in miracle technologies, we as a culture and a nation have a tendency to get carried away with the thought of our current transport system existing forever. It is honestly difficult to imagine anything else, even when you put your mind to it.
Large Sail Freight Vessel
So, the need clearly exists for a Food Movement Movement. But how would it operate? What vehicle could possibly provide New England’s massive import requirements with oil- and electricity-independent, renewable, reliable, and emissions-free transportation without the need for paved infrastructure? The answer isn’t terribly difficult to find for those who have studied the region’s history: Sailing Vessels.
Visit any one of the dozens of Maritime Museums in New England, and you can see there is plenty of tradition, knowledge, and capacity to supply New England’s food imports by sail freight. By my calculations (Pages 74-78 Here), a mere 3,000 ships and 18,000 sailors would be able to meet this demand with room to spare for a small amount of delays, time off, and some commodities I hadn’t included in the original math. This is with small vessels, too: A ship of only 111.5 tons cargo capacity, with a crew of 6.5 sailors was used as the rule.
Sail Training Vessel with Cadets
It is eminently possible to build, launch, and crew these vessels over the next 40 years, while creating tens of thousands of jobs. It is also more than possible to use existing training infrastructure from organizations such as Tall Ships America, US Sailing, and The American Sailing Association to ensure a sufficient pool of skilled windjammer sailors are at hand to take them over the seas.
This fleet only supplies the import needs of New England. The Coastal Trade in New England is prime territory for exploitation by enterprising Yankee Sailors, due to the historical settlement patterns of the region. Dozens of small ports and harbors can become points of carbon free shipping within the region, as was seen with the Vermont Sail Freight Project and Maine Sail Freight. These projects have shown the way to a Slow Food Movement Movement, though some brokerages and other infrastructure will need to be built to support this type of transportation. This type of business pattern change is a minor thing in all reality, and can be accomplished if we set some Yankee determination and ingenuity to work on it.
Tres Hombres Sail Freight Vessel
Far larger areas than just New England can be served by Sail Freight: Cities and towns along all four of the USA’s coastlines (Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, and Great Lakes) can benefit from Sail Freight, as can the massive regions of the midwest served by our over 12,000 miles of inland waterways. As with any other such infrastructure, ports, harbors, anchorages, channels, locks, dams, sluces, dry docks, weirs, inclined planes, and shipyards must be maintained every year, fully funded, and cared for. However, unlike other infrastructure investments, they are long term, lasting up to or in excess of 50 years for locks, and support carbon free shipping in the place of resource-intensive gas, diesel, and electric powered vehicles.
As we think of Slow Food, we should keep in mind the importance of moving that food around the block and around the world as sustainably as it was grown. With a bit of planning, civic involvement, prudence, and forethought, far more than just the slow food movement can benefit from the slow movement of food.
This article is a summary of the Steven Woods’ Master’s Thesis: “Sail Freight Revival: Methods of calculating fleet, cargo, and labor needs for supplying cities by sail.” Master’s Thesis. Prescott College, 2021. The full thesis can be read Here.
Solar Electric USCG Inspected passenger vessel Solaris
Steven Woods earned his master’s degree in Resilient and Sustainable Communities at Prescott College in 2021, with an undergraduate degree in History from LeMoyne College. He has worked in museums for over 20 years and is making a career transition to the sustainability field after 6 years in the US Airforce. He is presently the Solaris Coordinator at the Hudson River Maritime Museum.
Ssil Freight Schooner Apollonia
Sail Freight is an ancient, proven, and fuel-independent means of transportation for both cargo and people. At scale, it could easily provide a means of provisioning cities across the world with food and other essential goods, while avoiding the use of strategic materials such as lithium, cobalt, biofuels, solar panels, electricity, and copper which are needed for the land-based energy transition. The challenge of moving to a sustainable transportation system is of critical importance, and the need to maintain a sufficient transportation capacity for food is literally a matter of life and death.
Sail Freight Vessel Tres Hombres
Sail Freight has gained popularity and visibility as a means of near zero carbon transport, and justifiably so. As complex Sail Freight networks have existed for at least 4,000 years in the Mediterranean, and possibly as long as 40,000 years in the South Pacific, the art of sailing is not new, and does not require complex or energy intensive technologies. Once a sail freight vessel is launched, the carbon emissions from the vessel are nearly zero, and service lives can cover several decades. As 90% of the world’s commerce moves by sea, and modern container ships normally burn over 100 tons of heavy fuel oil per day on their voyages, sail freight seems a good means of cleaning up global commerce.
Until recently, it seems no one has examined the scale at which sail freight must be adopted to fulfill these hopes and aspirations, nor has anyone looked at the auxiliary challenges of adopting sail freight, such as the capacity available to train windjammer sailors, build ships, and so on. Other challenges arise simultaneously to fleet capacity: Food systems and diets must change, warehouses be revived and staffed, superfluous shipping avoided, and foodsheds altered, while regulations change and physical infrastructure needs to be modified. Without a systems view of the whole readoption of sailing freight; any discussion thereof is unlikely to grasp the magnitude of the task at hand.
Black Seal unloading in Brooklyn
The first step in such a process is establishing a level of supply needed in a given city, which in our case with be the New York Metro Area. To survive, the city must have 2.5 kilograms of food per person daily. With a population of some 20,000,000 people, the New York Metro Area needs 50,000 metric tons of food per day, at a minimum, to prevent starvation. This gives us our daily requirement but does not give the full picture. A representative model of the NYMA Foodshed must be established, and the travel times from the food’s origin to destination must be calculated, alongside time for loading and unloading, as well as time for the ship to return to the origin for its next cargo.
The table below gives one such model for the New York Metro Area, at two levels of supply, using relatively small vessels, and illustrates the challenge before us quite well.
As can be seen, even at the lowest possible level of supply, it would require nearly 10,000 ships and 65,000 sailors to supply New York with food, and this without allowing time for crew rest, delays, or ship maintenance. At our current pace of launching Sail Freight Vessels, it would take near 44,500 years to build such a fleet. If we put all the shipyards in the US to work on the problem, however, it could be accomplished in as little as 13 years. While this feat would only be a start, as other cities will need their own fleets, these figures show the scale of the problem we are confronted with, and that it can in fact be solved quickly and effectively.
Of course, ships without trained crews are useless. The time to train windjammer sailors must also be considered. With an average program able to train around 650 sailors in a given year, the number of training program years needed to train the NYMA fleet’s crew requirement would be some 100 years, though with 8 such programs running concurrently this could also be accomplished in less than 15 years. The chart below shows the relationship between training program years and shipyard years and demonstrates that training a sufficient number of sailors will likely take longer than the construction of a sufficient number of vessels for the mission at hand.
sail training vessel
These figures all rely on a “Survey Average Vessel” of 111.25 tons capacity, and 6.5 crew members on average. These would be relatively small vessels, and larger vessels will need fewer of both ships and crew to give the same Fleet Tonnage. It is likely in the beginning of sail freight’s revival that small vessels will be involved, both reclaimed and newly built, which will have larger crew requirements and lower tonnages than the model here portrays. It is worth taking a comprehensive look at the current sail training resources in the US and subsidizing the training of windjammer sailors and captains as soon as practicable.
In the case of Sail Freight, fuel or energy efficiency is not applicable in the same way as with conventional transportation. The appropriate metric of efficiency is “Tons Per Sailor” as the major cost is labor. The higher the tons per sailor, the lower the cost of moving cargo becomes, and the large the vessel, the greater the tons per sailor. Further, this metric is effected by rig, as seen below.
Sloops and Scchooners fore and aft rigs
Through the intelligent choice of rig for specific applications, crew requirements can be brought down somewhat as larger vessels proliferate. Fore-and-Aft rigged vessels such as sloops, schooners, and brigantines generally have a smaller crew and are well suited to the coastal trading which will likely constitute much of a sail freight food movement system. Barks, Ships, and very large schooners will also likely see use on longer routes with far more cargo, but moderately sized crews.
Other challenges are present for reviving sail freight. Without substantial changes bringing the external costs of road and fossil fueled transport into the economic equations through weight-distance, tire, fuel, and carbon taxes, sail freight will remain economically uncompetitive excepting on very long routes with high-value cargos. As the price of fossil fueled transport rises, this competitiveness will even out, and short sea shipping under sail will most likely gain traction in the economic mix.
truck pollution
There are significant benefits to moving to sail freight for climate policy which makes the case for its adoption despite these challenges. It has been calculated that at a minimum, more than 220,000 tons of CO2e could be eliminated from US transportation emissions through supplying the NYMA with food via Sail Freight. This model assumes that all food is brought via 10,000 TEU container ships, which can move some 380 ton-miles on a liter of diesel fuel. Trucking, by comparison, nets only 1.58, while trains can get up to about 118-ton miles per liter of diesel fuel. If the latter number was calculated for trucking emissions instead of conventional maritime transport, it would be some 21 billion liters of diesel fuel and 63,560,087,101 Tons of CO2e avoided annually. This amounts to some 362,000 barrels of oil per day.
pollution from ships
Alongside these benefits, shifting cargo to waterways will reduce congestion, wear, and tear on highway and rail systems, thus likely increasing the overall fuel efficiency of these same systems. Biofuels made from food wastes will be freed for use in supplying cities without nearby port facilities and demands on the grid for electrical power to fuel electric trucks will be lessened. In addition, the number of electric trucks to be built will also decline, making electrification faster and simpler in the long run.
Vermont Sail Freight Ceres
There are other advantages to Sail Freight which are less obvious than the environmental benefits and the challenge of training crews and building ships. For example, small vessels can be built inexpensively and with little needed in the way of facilities. Small ships can be built in the tradition of the Farmer’s Ships of the Aland Islands, which was effectively a combination of bot community supported agriculture and community supported shipping. Ceres of the Vermont Sail Freight Project is an example of just such a vessel, which made several successful voyages from Lake Champlain to New York City for the mere cost of some $20,000. With more advanced designs becoming available, planned for mass production and low cost in the style of the liberty ships of World War Two, these higher-capital ships will be in financial reach of cooperatives all around the four coastlines of the US and abroad.
Schooner Apollonia
This more democratic ownership model for transport, independent of fossil fuels, removes major costs for farmers in rural areas, especially as the cost of fuel and trucking rises. This can have the effect of lowering or stabilizing food prices for citizens while keeping more money moving to farmers and sailors. This is of mutual benefit to both city and countryside, clearly, but also reduces the power of banks and major corporations in both the transportation and food systems.
NYC Foodshed
Despite these benefits, there are many social and cultural adaptations which must be made to adapt to a Sail Freight future. The idea of constantly having fresh produce, in the off-season from 3,000 and more miles away will have to be abandoned. Diets must become more regionalized and localized, and the use of preserved foods instead of fresh in agricultural off seasons will become the rule. With innovative growing techniques, green houses, and other adaptations, there are likely to be small supplies of fresh foods in off seasons, but New York is unlikely to have shiploads of citrus arrive in good condition from Tampa after over a week in transit. Citrus juices, jams, preserves, and other shelf-stable confections will have to take the place of these foods where possible, and processing happen near the point of origin.
Next-day delivery will be impossible, and Just-In-Time delivery systems will be a thing of the past, replaced by acres of warehousing. wastes reduced, and material goods designed for repair instead of disposal. Superfluous Single-Use items such as coffee cups, plates, flatware, and bags should be banned on both environmental and logistical grounds. If every member of the NYMA used a single disposable coffee cup weighing 18 grams per day, the mass of cargo would amount to over 360 tons daily, or 131,400 tons of cargo in the year. If manufactured in Shanghai, 368 Survey Average Ships would need to be in constant motion between the two ports to maintain this entirely unnecessary practice.
Sail Freight Vessel Tres Hombres
Neoline Sail Freight
The future of Sail Freight is promising. Through the combination of modern knowledge and technology with proven older forms, a sustainable way of keeping cities alive can be created. While the challenge of building a Sail Freight future is certainly not easy, it can be done if we put our money, our time, and our backs to the task at hand. So doing could significantly alter the course of climate adaptations and climate change mitigation, provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, and democratize the economy in many beneficial ways. Given the gravity of our situation and the benefits to be gained, the case for Sail Freight should be clear to all.
