Saline Agriculture As the Future of Food

Damien1972 writes "To confront rising salinization, authors writing in the journal Science recommend increased spending on saline agriculture, which proposes growing salt-water crops to feed the world. Jelte Rozema and Timothy Flowers believe that salt-loving plants known as halophytes could become important crops, especially in areas where the salt content of the water is about half that of ocean water."

Comments

vaporware..

[LingNoi]

Sounded interesting until..

While the authors admit that "the use of saline water for irrigation is in its infancy", they see enough promise in saline agriculture that they believe it to be "worth serious consideration and development."

The only crop they suggest grow is Salicomia bigelovii crops.. Good for making soap but not so great for eating..

What we really need is more research into GM crops which the environmentalists hate for some reason.

It's proven to work in the past and has 30 year track record of bringing food into places where it was once not liveable.

Re:vaporware..

[Chris Burke]

What we really need is more research into GM crops which the environmentalists hate for some reason.

I consider myself an environmentalist, but I'm not against GM crops per-se. I'm against the most prominent examples of how they've actually been implemented and the companies responsible.

Basically, it comes down to this: If DRM is a bad idea for software, it's a fucking insanely retarded thing for food crops.

The present is the future

[Kohath]

The future of food is exactly like the present. There's plenty of food. There's so much that they're converting it into transportation fuel to prop up the price of the food. They're subsidizing food production because farmers can't pay their bills because huge surpluses drag down the market price. Obesity is a growing international problem because there's so much food.

There is no global food production problem

[EmbeddedJanitor]

"We're all going to starve" is just fear mongering. It is hard to say who's behind it, but I'd finger big agri-biz, trying to prevent being forced into more sustainable farming practices.

We have vast excesses of food in this world. There are now more fat people than starving people.

Talk to any farmer (as I do, living in a rural area) and the problem they face is not production, but stimulating consumption to help increase demand and prices.
Feedlots are highly inefficient ways to process food. Take 20 to 50 food units of grain, put them through a feedlot and get one food unit out. A vast % of the food stream is handled this way. Reducing feedlot meat consumption by 20% and the world's food supply will probably double.