You can find this stuff growing in most salt marshes. It's an interesting plant. Like a cactus, it has to avoid dehydration (only due to a saline rather than an arid environment) so it evolved a fleshy, succulent body without leaves. It grows as a low shoot a 10-15 cm high with branches about 0.5cm thick in among the spartina grass in somewhat muddy, salty organic muck. At least that's what it's like up here in New England -- on the west coast where Spartina is an exotic there are probably different species of Salicornia have differnt growth habits.
If you want to try Salicornia for yourself, go for a walk in a nice salt marsh and look for a little green plant with no immediately visible leaves and fleshy green stalks that snap like a fresh deli pickle. It's edible, although sometimes it has a slightly marshy off-taste. If you pick it from a clean, well flushed location it has a mild, slightly briny taste. It's only a little salty -- it's innards couldn't be salty and survive. It's good in a salad, and I can see using it in salsa. Comparing it to asparagus as some peole do is a bit of a stretch though -- I doubt it will never be much of a human staple.
Even so my hat's off to this guy. I'd be willing to bet that 99% of the crops grown boil down to about twenty species and that no more than a few hundred out of the millions of plant species are used for human consumption. Think of what it would be like without corn, tomatoes, or potatoes -- all of which were unknown outside of the Americas until the 1500s and not widely used until the 1800s. There's a whole new world of plant species out there.
I also think this guy is also trying something a bit more ambitious than just cultivating salt tolerant plants. It sounds like he's trying to build the farm as a semi-closed ecological system rather than as an agricultural factory. In a factory model, you have your raw materials brought from elsewhere (water, seeds, fertilizer) and you have your waste materials (nutrient and pesticide laden runoff) taken away. In an ecological system every waste product of every subsystem is food for another subsystem. Of course regular farms work this way too, but they don't do so comprehensively. It might not be financially practical in the first world where labor costs are high and capital is available.
Ultimately if a farm were like an ecological system its outputs other than human consumables would circulate endlessly in a closed loop. Ultimately, if our human systems don't form closed loops on a global scale then we will have problems as we run out of places to put our waste and sources of materials. Closing the loop on a small scale would be particularly beneficial to developing countries who don't have the capital to shift these problems elsewhere.
-- Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Part of the problem with this guy's approach is that it hugs the coasts -- the most highly prized real estate in the world. Additionally, the coastal ecosystems are among the most valued -- without human "enhancement".
Agriculture can be removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.
On about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert, California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5 years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or "nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own acreage in conventional agricultural uses.
The late John Martin at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate (available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting) over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from "crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of 50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they terminated the fertilization and watched.
When they terminated the fertilization, the artificial ecosystem eventually disappeared.
The density of nutrients is important. If you have too much, the phytoplankton dies without being eaten by the zooplankton (or grazing fish) and rots, thereby removing oxygen from the water and suffocating the grazers and fish. Too little nutrient, and you have an ocean desert. There is a broad range of nutrient density where zooplankton and fish can swim from one meal to the next without starving -- and the abundant fish catches off of Peru are an example of what you get when you make it easy for fish to fatten up on phytoplankton grazers.
The ratio of Peru's fish production between normal (fertile) times to El Ninio is 1000.
The areas of ocean desert amenable to such fertilization vastly exceed those required to economically provide the entire world's population with a protein rich diet based on high quality sea food. An added benefit is that the phytoplankton growth captures CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby reducing global warming.
This option for humanity is no where more important than in Africa and the Amazon where populations that are well adapted for the tropics are currently threatening some of Earth's most valuable natural habitats with some of the most inefficient agricultural uses of land. Those who seek to save the tropics should take objective steps toward opening up this tropical oceanic frontier.
In conclusion: Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.
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You can find this stuff growing in most salt marshes. It's an interesting plant. Like a cactus, it has to avoid dehydration (only due to a saline rather than an arid environment) so it evolved a fleshy, succulent body without leaves. It grows as a low shoot a 10-15 cm high with branches about 0.5cm thick in among the spartina grass in somewhat muddy, salty organic muck. At least that's what it's like up here in New England -- on the west coast where Spartina is an exotic there are probably different species of Salicornia have differnt growth habits.
If you want to try Salicornia for yourself, go for a walk in a nice salt marsh and look for a little green plant with no immediately visible leaves and fleshy green stalks that snap like a fresh deli pickle. It's edible, although sometimes it has a slightly marshy off-taste. If you pick it from a clean, well flushed location it has a mild, slightly briny taste. It's only a little salty -- it's innards couldn't be salty and survive. It's good in a salad, and I can see using it in salsa. Comparing it to asparagus as some peole do is a bit of a stretch though -- I doubt it will never be much of a human staple.
Even so my hat's off to this guy. I'd be willing to bet that 99% of the crops grown boil down to about twenty species and that no more than a few hundred out of the millions of plant species are used for human consumption. Think of what it would be like without corn, tomatoes, or potatoes -- all of which were unknown outside of the Americas until the 1500s and not widely used until the 1800s. There's a whole new world of plant species out there.
I also think this guy is also trying something a bit more ambitious than just cultivating salt tolerant plants. It sounds like he's trying to build the farm as a semi-closed ecological system rather than as an agricultural factory. In a factory model, you have your raw materials brought from elsewhere (water, seeds, fertilizer) and you have your waste materials (nutrient and pesticide laden runoff) taken away. In an ecological system every waste product of every subsystem is food for another subsystem. Of course regular farms work this way too, but they don't do so comprehensively. It might not be financially practical in the first world where labor costs are high and capital is available.
Ultimately if a farm were like an ecological system its outputs other than human consumables would circulate endlessly in a closed loop. Ultimately, if our human systems don't form closed loops on a global scale then we will have problems as we run out of places to put our waste and sources of materials. Closing the loop on a small scale would be particularly beneficial to developing countries who don't have the capital to shift these problems elsewhere.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Agriculture can be removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.
On about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert, California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5 years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or "nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own acreage in conventional agricultural uses.
The late John Martin at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate (available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting) over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from "crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of 50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they terminated the fertilization and watched.
When they terminated the fertilization, the artificial ecosystem eventually disappeared.
The density of nutrients is important. If you have too much, the phytoplankton dies without being eaten by the zooplankton (or grazing fish) and rots, thereby removing oxygen from the water and suffocating the grazers and fish. Too little nutrient, and you have an ocean desert. There is a broad range of nutrient density where zooplankton and fish can swim from one meal to the next without starving -- and the abundant fish catches off of Peru are an example of what you get when you make it easy for fish to fatten up on phytoplankton grazers.
The ratio of Peru's fish production between normal (fertile) times to El Ninio is 1000.
The areas of ocean desert amenable to such fertilization vastly exceed those required to economically provide the entire world's population with a protein rich diet based on high quality sea food. An added benefit is that the phytoplankton growth captures CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby reducing global warming.
This option for humanity is no where more important than in Africa and the Amazon where populations that are well adapted for the tropics are currently threatening some of Earth's most valuable natural habitats with some of the most inefficient agricultural uses of land. Those who seek to save the tropics should take objective steps toward opening up this tropical oceanic frontier.
In conclusion: Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.
Seastead this.