Sourcing
Iron Bacteria
YT Video; Science Direct Article;
The video is from primitive tech channel. He extracts iron using primitive tools from surface liquid that is apparently growing Iron Bacteria (Gallionella and Leptothrix). He is able to make a very simple iron knife by doing this.
Iron Bacteria is often found in people's wells making the water taste bad and needs to be treated.
My interest is weather we could cultivate the bacteria and regularly extract iron from them. It would be interesting if you could feed it something like Red Clay (Ultisol) which has high concentrations of iron oxide and extract the iron using the bacteria. It would be good to compare using iron bacteria and some other more industrial method to see which is better as far as being low maintenance and efficent.
And as a side note the same bacteria can extract manganese which is used in stainless steel production.