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

No spices needed.

[tripdizzle]

I am sick of salting my popcorn anyway.

I fully endorse this.

[ValuJet]

Next step, salt water taffy farms.

Necessary

[Valdrax]

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.

Re:Necessary

[DJDuck]

To add to your reading "Back from the Brink" by Peter Andrews. The guy is no scientist, but as a life long farmer, who has proved that he can rehabilitate land, his ideas must be seriously considered. And what's more, they are cheap, just let the weeds grow and stop leaving ground bare.

Re:Necessary

[Valdrax]

Necessary:
The article is about utilizing salt water for plants, not about damaging soil with current practices.

The current practices are why we need to use plants capable of growing in salt water. I mean, that's what the second paragraph of the article points out! Excessive irrigation has destroyed the usability of acres and acres of farmland in Australia, California, Northern China, Iraq, South Africa, etc, etc. It's pretty much a problem everywhere in the world.

This article is about finding a suitable use for the ruined areas, not about adding salt water to good soil. Please reread TFA.

Guns, Germs, and Steel = Eugenics, Racism, Sexism. The kind of box only children with small imaginations like.

I can only conclude that you haven't read the book at all. It's the only explanation I can find for why you'd spout off that nonsense. Jared Diamond takes great lengths to discount racist theories of why certain civilizations have triumphed over others.

The great overarching theme of the book is that Europe and Asia had several geological advantages over the rest of the world that led to their more rapid growth and civilization: easier to cultivate and more nutritious crops, better access to large animals capable of being domesticated, an east-west trade axis that allowed early agricultural technology to spread across large areas (without running into climates where the same crops couldn't be grown), etc. He neither advocates for any racial or gender superiority theories.

Seeing as you've obviously neither read the article in this discussion nor the books I commented on, you probably should refrain from sticking your foot further in your mouth on this matter. (i.e. lurk moar)

Bioremediation

[ZirbMonkey]

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!

Re:Bioremediation

[idontgno]

I'm totally in favor of bioremediation, but can we please draw a clean line between bioremediation crops and crops I put into my mouth? Pre-salted potato chips are good as long as the salts in question aren't toxic metal halides (Cadmium Chloride... YUMMY!). And no PCBs, dioxin, or radioactives, please.

Re:Bioremediation

[ZirbMonkey]

You've obviously never eaten Pringles then.

Re:Bioremediation

[SwordsmanLuke]

I used to live in Idaho, literally up the street from a potato processing plant. After I found out what kind of potatoes Pringles were made from, it took me three years to be willing to eat them again. :)

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..

[internerdj]

At least we can finally fix the unwashed part of the whole unwashed masses thing...

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.

Re:vaporware..

[Entropy2016]

You're forgetting also the legal ramifications of patented GM organisms which require licenses to grow.

Nothing like GM crops accidentally creeping into an unwitting farmer's crop, giving the GM-corporation (coughmonsantocough) an excuse to sue the heck out of people who didn't even want anything to do with their modified crops.

Re:vaporware..

[serbanp]

My point was that that video presented no actual content. Come on, showing malnourished black kids and then panning the camera to lush, green corn fields is a basic manipulation technique.

The thing about GM food is that it has been touted as a magnificent cure for all sort of issues, but the reality is that it keeps failing reaching its stated goals. There are no demonstrable examples where GM food is in any way better, hardier, more nutritious, higher yield or cheaper to produce comparing to the "conventional" agriculture. However, interested parties kept beating the drum about "in the past x years, GMO were shown to have saved y lives with no adverse effects etc" to such extents that it became a dogma. Keep repeating a lie and it starts ringing true.

For example, I read a little more about the beta-carotene producing rice, a.k.a. "golden rice". It's supposed to save untold number of children in Africa from blindness. In fact, the beta-carotene content is so low that a kid would have to eat a few pounds of rice every day to meet the required level. A vitamin booster tablet given twice a year cures the issue and costs less than half a dollar. Perfecting the useless golden rice strain cost several hundred million dollars. It looks to me that all was a PR stunt to improve the GM image after all the publicized failures from the nineties.

Again, try to push aside the PR fog and check a few facts; you'd be surprised by how much BS the big pharma and agri companies put out in the last two decades.

Gills for everyone!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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!

Brawndo

[TeknoHog]

It's got electrolytes!

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.

Re:Just curious...

[FooAtWFU]

Is anyone still subsidizing corn-based ethanol so we can save about 2% on carbon emissions per mile, while we drain those midwestern aquifers even faster than we were before?

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.

Re:There is no global food production problem

[thepotoo]

That's just plain wrong. Many crops, especially soy beans and nuts, will provide tons of proteins.

Pick up any environmental studies textbook and they will confirm that a vegetarian diet is more efficient from an environmental standpoint.

Having said that, the only nutrient that cannot be obtained from plants is Vitamin B12, you must consume some animal product (even a small amount of something like milk or eggs is enough) to get enough of it.

Note: I'm not trying to force a vegetarian diet on you, go on and enjoy your steak. But know that it is possible to do without it.

Re:There is no global food production problem

[J05H]

Are you familiar with the actual practice of chicken (esp. layers - egg production) or industrial pig farming? They may be more efficient grain-consumption-per-pound over beef but are incredible polluters.

Chickens are treated as pure product in a typical egg facility and it is not much better for meat birds. Arguably, "ichto" or "octo"-vegetarians have a less ethical stand than a meat diet WRT chicken farming. Fish farming produces more sewage than humans in cities.Pig farming has created massive water-pollution issues in the US Southeast. Is beef feed-lot production better or worse? Soybeans? Modern Corn? They are all pollutants in some ways either as oil-consumers or waste producers. How do you complete the circle between those problems?

Free range makes more sense of course put has land-use issues that would be opposed in some environmental circles. Terrestrial fish farms produce pollution in quantity, plus contribute to the depletion of feeder fish in the oceans as fish meal.

All food has ethical issues.

So what? I still like an omelet or steak once in a while. Food more than anything is a commercial enterprise - people vote with their dollars and overwhelmingly vote for (some) meat.

There are ways around the ethical problems but the steps to get there can be tremendous. One is to use biomass more efficiently, another is create habitat that attracts exploitable species (reefs, buffalo reintroduction) a third to mandate industry and utilities to be zero-effluent (good luck w/ that). Personally the idea of saline agriculture is an interesting co-opting of this as it would enable both the plant crops as food and better fish farming practices. Creating more ecology, living space for more life that can be harvested, is the really important step - especially in the seas. Increase density of habitat, increase amount of life - things like floating reefs in the mid-ocean and build other artificial reefs, in quantity. Much of the ocean is sandy wastes - a little terrain goes a long way underwater. Mats of floating plants could work using saline crops and mangrove, once started they could drift as floating islands or be anchored in place w/ tide generators.

Re:There is no global food production problem

[thepotoo]

I hate to respond to a troll, but you may be an unintentional one, so I'll try to explain.

All proteins are broken down and resynthesized in your body, so you don't need to worry about getting some protein from animals. There are 20 amino acids that are common to all life as we know it (needed to make polypeptides), 10 of these can be synthesized from the other 10, so as long as you've got these ten essential amino acids in your diet, you're all set (assuming you've got all the fats, lipids, etc. you need).

The certain macronutrients are stuff like omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, they are harder to obtain from non-meat sources, but it is possible (flax seeds, walnuts).

"Tons of books" is not a citation, not sure what point you're trying to make with that anyway. And as for your anecdotal evidence: I know a guy who's second cousin was vegetarian, and he didn't get severely sick, so there! (Seriously, your friend might not have been getting enough omega-3s, but I'm not a dietitian, so I can't say for sure).

Yes, I do think it's perfectly healthy. It's a bit more work to pick foods that give a complete and balanced diet (and a vegan diet is most definitely not healthy), but it is healthy.

Great idea! How about resistance to polution too?

[Khopesh]

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...

GM Crops

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Just curious...

[bockelboy]

Zimbabwe, physically, is actually one of the best places to grow corn in Africa. They were once a breadbasket of the region.

Of course now, the entire economy has completely collapsed, so much of the country is starving.

That aside, it's a decent place to grow some corn.

Parent is disinformative

[Valdrax]

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.

Re:Parent is disinformative

[Valdrax]

As opposed to the completely made-up data and completely erroneous and overly-simplistic models by the "global warming" crowd.

I hear that said a lot by people who aren't willing to back up their wild claims. If you've got some proof that data is "completely made-up" or that modeling is "overly-simplistic," I'd love to hear it.

extracting salt with barley and/or sugar beets

[j1m 5n0w]

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."

Re:Just curious...

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Arabs created the Sahara?

Um...

"The Sahara is currently as dry as it was about 13,000 years ago."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara

Were Arabs destroying the Sahara 13,000 years ago?

Dont fight it, use it

[sirusv]

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.

Re:Just curious...

[MaskedSlacker]

There should not be any list of scientists opposing global warming. A scientist would never be opposed to any interpretation. They might consider the interpretation incorrect, but that is a VERY different thing from being opposed to it.

As an example: I think intelligent design is incorrect, I am opposed to teaching intelligent design as science. I am NOT opposed to intelligent design itself. That would be stupid.

I'm sure you'll accuse me of being pedantic, and nit-picking, but if you do you are missing my point. Linguistic laziness and poor communication skills are the source of all flame wars and I am god damn sick of them. People need to learn how to speak.

Seasteading

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Better idea...

[gstrickler]

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.

Your ignorance astounds me

[spun]

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?