While it may take more cactus every day than other foods such as hay to feed a cow, the eating of cactus drastically decreases cows' daily needs for water. So cactus not only takes less water to grow but eliminates a lot more water that cows need to drink.

When the filter arrived yesterday I was presented with a problem.  The filter works great in its function of getting out the dirt and other contaminents out of the water, but it is very slow.  I needed to figure out some way to pressurize the system in order to maximize the efficiency of the filter.  From the beginning, I knew I wanted it to be all man powered (some sort of hand or foot pump) and not an electronic air pump.  I also wanted to pump to be "user friendly," so they could continue cooking, for example, while still pumping the water.  The only thing that fit this criteria, in my mind, was a foot pump.  Unfortunately, it was the second to last day in the studio and all I had accessible to me was a bike pump. This turned out to work pretty well.  I would not want to have a bike pump in the final prototype because using the bike pump uses your whole body, and takes a lot of work for only a little bit of water.  However, for the purposes of this experiment it worked wonders.  The only problem was that lid to the top bucket kept leaking.  When I took it off I saw the air pressure had actually warped the plastic, and I now was not able to put the lid on the bucket with its original seal.    I also noticed that the water filters a lot faster when there aren't big clumps of dirt or mud (not surprising).  When pressurizing the system with relatively clean water on top, there was a steady stream of water coming out the bottom.  WIth the dirty water, there were two drips of water a second.  I think adding more pressure would continue to increase the efficiency of the system.  Maybe in the next prototype I use a metal bucket and lid in hopes of completely sealing the lid.

This is a model I made on Vensim. Vensim is a modeling software. The model shows how the main aspects of selling, buying, growing, and distribution of cactus are related. The goal was to figure out how much cactus would have to be produced in order for the business to become profitable. 

Though the model looks complicated and confusing from afar, a closer look will reveal that each individual connection makes sense. Look at the "Welfare" graph. If the supply is high and the price is low, the people are happy. If the supply is low and the price is high, the people are unhappy. As some of the current stock of cactus decay, the profit goes down. The amount in the stock is determined by the demand and supply, and the amount of stock determines the sales. The stock has a decay, surplus and deficit, meaning that after the growing season some of the cactus is stored. Some of the cactus is lost (decay) some is extra (surplus). Sales in tons are converted to profit in dollars. Profit is determined by the sales and the price of cactus and decreased by the cost of growing the cactus and the cactus lost during the year due to varying factors. 

I worked on Adobe Illustrator to make a logo for our pump which we are calling PumpIT. We also worked on our presentation, adding images and simplyifying the slides.

I have reached a decision. My cooking has not been going as well as I had hoped for. The image above is from when I tried to make stuffed cactus by cutting the cactus in half. Needless to say, that did not end up as planned. As my various cooking projects have ended in not the best of ways, I have decided to take another approach to my cactus endeavor. I have decided to use cactus as a way to feed cattle instead of humans. As cattles have a less discerning sense of taste, I figure they as a whole would be more open to eating cactus than humans. Admittedly some humans do enjoy the taste of cactus, and I hope that they continue their cactus-eating, but as a whole they may be less welcoming of cactus as a new food than cows. After doing some preliminary research, I found out that nopales or "prickly pear" cacti have been used as cattle feed before. It works best when combined with hay. Apparently the cactus has been used as cattle feed for over 100 years. It is not widely used but the cows that do use the cacti were healthy enough. The farmers  singed the spikes off of the cacti to get rid of the harmful sharp parts. This seems like a much more plausible idea than replacing all human-eaten corn products with cactus. Since cattle feed makes up so much of the annual corn consumed, this solution will actually make the most difference. I am working to compare cactus with corn as cattle feed and figure out how much cactus feed is needed vs silage, what nutrients cattle can gain from cactus, and other such facts. 

Today we started working on our actual projects. With a spectacular device in mind, Jess, Kate, Max and I sketched, and started prototyping our ocean surface pump. Jess and I found a plastic pipe about one inch thick and used the wire cutter to cut a circular foam float fitting around the pipe at the top and potentially keeping it afloat. We did not push the pipe all the way up to the top of the hole and additionally carved out some space in the top of the foam to have room for water to be pumped. Tomorrow we will think about the flaps or doors that allow the cold water to come up through the bottom and not down through the top, cut down the pipe to an apropriate length, and cut down the foam enough to keep the pipe afloat. 

We have redesigned our pump yet again. We now have a much better sense of what we need to accomplish for our pump, after going through the simulations. Our design is now closer to our first design with all the one-way valves.  The tricky thing about our pump is we really want it to be wave powered. We are determined to make it wave powered.

I tried to fry cactus like a french fry. It wasn't too good. I used cactus, flour, eggs, and milk. I cooked them on an electric griddle pan thing. The first time it was just floppy and very oily and not good. The second one I made, I added more flour and took out the milk from the batter so it was just eggs. That one was slightly better but still pretty weird. After that one I added some more flour again and added sugar and salt to the egg batter. That one came out a bit firmer and nicer. It tasted better as well. I cooked a fourth one with a bit more sugar and salt, but wasn't sure about the fried-cactus idea so I decided to move on to bigger and better recipes. People thought it wasn't terrible, but not particularly good either. Most preferred the taste of raw cactus over the taste of fried cactus.