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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."
A couple weeks ago, while browsing around the library downtown, I had to take a piss. As I entered the john, Barack Obama -- the messiah himself -- came out of one of the booths. I stood at the urinal looking at him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He didn't once look at me. He was busy and in any case I was sure the secret service wouldn't even let me shake his hand.
As soon as he left I darted into the booth he'd vacated, hoping there might be a lingering smell of shit and even a seat still warm from his sturdy ass. I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush. And what a treasure he had left behind. Three or four beautiful specimens floated in the bowl. It apparently had been a fairly dry, constipated shit, for all were fat, stiff, and ruggedly textured. The real prize was a great feast of turd -- a nine inch gastrointestinal triumph as thick as his cock -- or at least as I imagined it!
I knelt before the bowl, inhaling the rich brown fragrance and wondered if I should obey the impulse building up inside me. I'd always been a liberal democrat and had been on the Obama train since last year. Of course I'd had fantasies of meeting him, sucking his cock and balls, not to mention sucking his asshole clean, but I never imagined I would have the chance. Now, here I was, confronted with the most beautiful five-pound turd I'd ever feasted my eyes on, a sausage fit to star in any fantasy and one I knew to have been hatched from the asshole of Barack Obama, the chosen one.
Why not? I plucked it from the bowl, holding it with both hands to keep it from breaking. I lifted it to my nose. It smelled like rich, ripe limburger (horrid, but thrilling), yet had the consistency of cheddar. What is cheese anyway but milk turning to shit without the benefit of a digestive tract?
I gave it a lick and found that it tasted better then it smelled.
I hesitated no longer. I shoved the fucking thing as far into my mouth as I could get it and sucked on it like a big half nigger cock, beating my meat like a madman. I wanted to completely engulf it and bit off a large chunk, flooding my mouth with the intense, bittersweet flavor. To my delight I found that while the water in the bowl had chilled the outside of the turd, it was still warm inside. As I chewed I discovered that it was filled with hard little bits of something I soon identified as peanuts. He hadn't chewed them carefully and they'd passed through his body virtually unchanged. I ate it greedily, sending lump after peanutty lump sliding scratchily down my throat. My only regret was that Barack Obama wasn't there to see my loyalty and wash it down with his piss.
I soon reached a terrific climax. I caught my cum in the cupped palm of my hand and drank it down. Believe me, there is no more delightful combination of flavors than the hot sweetness of cum with the rich bitterness of shit. It's even better than listening to an Obama speech!
Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn't made it last longer. But then I realized that I still had a lot of fun in store for me. There was still a clutch of virile turds left in the bowl. I tenderly fished them out, rolled them into my handkerchief, and stashed them in my briefcase. In the week to come I found all kinds of ways to eat the shit without bolting it right down. Once eaten it's gone forever unless you want to filch it third hand out of your own asshole. Not an unreasonable recourse in moments of desperation or simple boredom.
I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone. The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process.
I often think of Barack Obama dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did, bring to a grateful democrat.
I am sick of salting my popcorn anyway.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Next step, salt water taffy farms.
I love halophytes...especially wrapped around raw fish and rice.
...is there anyone still denying global warming?
Is the point of contention now whether or not pollution by people are to blame? I forget where we are on the issue.
I'd like to recommend the book "Collapse," by Jared Diamond (the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel," another book I'd recommend). He spends several pages explaining the damage that salinization has done to farmland in places like Australia. It's kind of an eye opener about how wasteful irrigation policies have ended up basically permanently ruining large ares of Australia's farmlands by drawing salt up into the soil.
The damage, once done, is ridiculously expensive to fix, so we need to find crops that can grow in the unusable land, especially as the world's population grows -- especially its meat-eating population as third world countries acquire first world living standards, which multiplies the need for vegetable crops.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I love to hear about innovations like this. However it can be taken a step further.
Not only can we make crops resistant to salty conditions, we can breed them to fix the soil and remove that salt. Bioremediation works on all sorts of poisoned soils, removing all sorts of poisons.
Hell, we could have pre-salted potato chips!
Sounded interesting until..
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.
The article states that only 1% of terrestrial plants can grow in such conditions and it names exactly one crop that might, theoretically, be valuable for its oil. Wow. That's a pretty slim basis on which to try to feed humanity.
So why don't we just artificially mutate the human race, to have have gills, so that we can all just live in the ocean?
And eat coral and seaweed, and stuff like that.
If we lived in the ocean, we might more enjoy eating stuff that grows there . . . like each other!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's got electrolytes!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
yes, why don't we convert more wetlands, seeing how well Louisiana fared with Katrina!
This article (at Mongabay, not Science) starts out strong, saying "accessible and unpolluted freshwater is a necessity for every nation's stability and well-being." Unfortunately, that first sentence was the last reference in the article to the issue of pollution or non-salt contamination.
What we really need is the ability to farm directly in the ocean without producing inedible food. The article's referenced halophytes (plants that can grow in salt water) are just one piece of the issue, as the ocean is also filled with other contaminants (mercury, industrial waste, and so very much more). We can probably do some farming with net-like filters around enclosed areas (similar to the way most fish farming works). Wikipedia calls this "open cage aquaculture." However, these filters can only get so much, and once you get complex enough to need a treatment facility, you've defeated the purpose of farming in the ocean (unless you treat the whole ocean...).
The referenced Science Magazine article gets published tomorrow, but you can see related documents by searching for the authors (Rozema and Flowers) and salination. Perhaps the actual article will discuss this issue...
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
What kind of edibles does this really produce? I don't wanna eat no stinkweed.
Greening the desert
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Anyone else considering making an Atriplex sheep farm in the desert, or am I just wierd?
What we really need is more research into GM crops which the environmentalists hate for some reason.
I'll try to field this one. I'm a moderate on the issue. I don't think GM crops are themselves a bad idea, but I am studying environmental law, and I have pretty good exposure to what people in the movement worry about.
You can summarize the problem with GM crops into a few distinct worries:
1) A love of "natural" foods.
2) Worries about crop contamination.
3) What GM technology is *actually* being used for. (Instead of the "feel good" science.)
4) Safety issues in the creation of GM crops.
First, a lot of people worry about "frankenfoods." They don't want "unnatural" crops because they're worried about the safety of these crops. As my use of quotation marks suggests, I'm not a big supporter of this viewpoint, but a lot of customer do feel that way which is one reason why organic food certifications don't allow GM crops. I won't defend this view because it's not my own, and I haven't gotten a good solid explanation of it.
But it brings us to point 2. Pollen from GM crops is a HUGE problem for organic farmers. Planting GM crops freely in an area can destroy the market for organic crops at home as well as for selling to Europe and other parts of the world where GM crops are disdained by customers. You simply cannot protect your crop against contamination in many cases. (Also, besides market concerns, there's the infamous Canadian patents case, Monsanto v. Schmeiser .)
The third point is one that really cheeses of a lot of environmentalists. You hear a lot of awesome things in the news about how scientists have invented rice with extra vitamin A or tomatoes with longer shelf life. The truth is that there are really only two major types of changes which companies have fought to get onto the market -- crops that come with their own built-in Bt insecticide and crops that let you liberally sprinkle around the herbicide RoundUp. (A notable exception to this would be GM papaya engineered to resist the papaya ringspot virus which saved the Hawaiian conventional papaya industry while wiping out the organic industry there.)
Personally, I would have no problem with eating crops modified to be more healthy, but both of the above practices do nothing but help prolong the survival of crop monocultures. A lot of farming pest problems exist largely because farmers fight tooth and nail to plant the same plant over and over again, providing excellent feeding grounds for pests and opportunistic species. The use of Bt has taken a surprisingly long time to create resistance pests, but hey, so it begins. Oh, and RoundUp resistance is starting to become increasingly common, meaning that farmers are going to start turning to more toxic chemicals.
It's like disease resistance and the use of antibiotics in farm animals, another tragedy of the commons situation. People realized that if you give cattle antibiotics, they grow larger, so farmers started pumping cattle full of a variety of antibiotics. One by one, bacteria have become resistant in the animals themselves, through plasmid swapping in the soil and environment, and through exposure throughout the environment thanks to runoff of cattle urine and wastes into streams. So, they keep trying new chemicals as the old ones cease to work (or in the case of tetracycline resistance endanger human health).
So, as insecticides & pesticides become useless, farmers will turn to increasingly more hostile and dangerous chemicals to farm. ...Which they wouldn't need so much if practiced more sustainable agriculture methodology. But the USDA subsidizes the current monoculture-friendly, heavy petroleum byproducts using methods, so as game theory suggests, no one wants to change.
Anyway, the la
The idea that the sun is the dominant factor in global warming has been resoundingly debunked.
And the idea that warming has increased carbon dioxide (and that somehow carbon dioxide is just an innocent bystander in the whole affair) is frankly facile. Carbon dioxide is the dominant cause of global warming (with methane coming in second). Global warming is increasing the release of some natural carbon dioxide sources. However, these natural releases are DWARFED by industrial releases, a fact commonly ignored by "global warming causes increased CO2" reality deniers. It's a theory that only holds up if you completely toss large amounts of data out the window, which frankly isn't uncommon among the "global warming is a myth" crowd.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
And don't forget..those brackish waters are good for growing yummy oysters too!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Why change the damaging farming practices when you can just change the crops?
I found some information on wikipedia about that:
"Salt-tolerant (moderately halophytic) barley and/or sugar beets are commonly used for the extraction of Sodium chloride (common salt) to reclaim fields that were previously flooded by sea water."
Could also be a future food ... although it's PEOPLE!!
... Because we don't already have enough salt/sodium in our diets...
Don't fall for it, we know the truth...
Because that could solve a lot of problems.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Locatated in the upper south east of South Australia my father has been very sucussful in converting once barron salt pans in to usable pasture with Puccinellia. This grass originates from the west coast of Turkey and it is claimed that it is the most salt tolerant of all the commercially available grasses. James has always had an environmental eye in how he approached farming. I have heard him say 'don't fight it, use it' on more than one occasion. Field studies into the use of Puccinellia at his property have shown that the results were spectacular. Puccinellia has now become an intergral part of the farm providing highly productive and useful pasture component.
The beginning of your comment was on track for an insightful mod, then you ended your comments about how to judge propaganda with a link about SICK BABIES. Dear god, think about the children man, did you not see the irony in that?
Much of America is not planting because of cost and crop failure. There are just as many Americans in percentage starving as the rest of the world, and it has to do with food quality at its best. GMO'd plants are screwing-up the heirloom varieties, and the hybridization they cause will always ruin the growth and fruit of the plant if not the attornies that sew the plantation owner for another cropper's pollen blowing in the wind.
A good read is about permaculture farming. A man bought the saltiest ungrowable land in Galilee and found that dumping piles of unburned weeds on the topsoil would cause a fungus to grow and render the salt inert thus allowing anything to grow; and an added symptom, whichever fruiting plant grown somehow is affected to the oddity by fruiting near five-fold quicker than in the rest of the world: plants that previously would only fruit after 4 years would do so within the same year.
The quality and variety of franchise grocery stores is somewhat odd. I get headaches now from eating certain strains of meaty plant fruits like apples and oranges. Water-quality itself is killing everyone's kidneys and pancreas, so the best source of water is to get it from vegetables and fruits to let them filter the water if it didn't kill them off. I have taken the incentive to my own to move onto hydroponics-grown heirloom plants, and leave the super-production plants like goji, super garlic (remedies hepatitis, pneumonia, and whatnot), heirloom red onion (hard to get, because they produce magnesium while the modern GMO'd ones can't) in a regulated soil to maximize effectiveness.
All the crap they put in the grocery stores is grown like a strip-mine. It's bastardry, and Monsonta Corporation and its pretty step-children are the cause of it. Even look at how the Doomsday Seedbank in Norway will not accept the non-GMO'd varieties of heirloom fruiting plants from various countries as though it is preparing to begin class warfare at the level of food quality. Plenty of that on YouTube.
without prejudice
This topic interests me in the context of "seasteading" especially. It would be helpful to have a suitable crop for growing in the ocean rather than on platforms on the ocean. Kelp/seaweed would be suitable, if it could be grown in the shallows near a platform in deep water. From what I understand, there was such an experiment, done by dangling a frame below a floating platform. Unfortunately, the vibrations of the cables damaged the plants.
I've got a better idea. Stop wasting farmland and fresh water growing crops to make ethanol. Use those for growing food. If you want to grow stuff for ethanol, use saltwater and/or aquaculture. There's plenty of saltwater, plenty of space, and it's resources that aren't already in high demand.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
is totally enough time to reveal the full effect GM crops will have on the world.
At least it isn't Soylent Green. ...or is it?
http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/ST/NA/NAAL/agri/pbu/agriPBUmain.php
Holy crap, you are frighteningly misinformed about a great many things. Firstly, the government in Zimbabwe is in no way socialist. Taking property from one private owner and giving it to another private owner could hardly be called socialist. As for white-hating, well, 1% of the population is white, but they owned 70% of the land. And they got it the old fashioned way, by stealing it.
Your grasp of history is equally ridiculous. Security a problem for 1000 years? What about the colonial era, the Mutapa empire, the Bantu civilization?
The Sahara has not been a forest for tens of thousands of years. It was a grassland, then it dried up, then the ice age hit, then it warmed up and got wetter, then drier. It's been a desert since about 3,000BC. Muslims had advanced and sustainable agriculture far in advance of what Europeans had. They did nothing bad to the Sahara.
Where are you even getting your information from? Everything I'm saying can be easily looked up online, but I can't even find a single source for anything you claim. Are you making it up, or parroting it back from some right wing hate site?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton