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Science

Saltwater Agriculture 101

Posted by michael from the bubba-gump dept.
Diplomat73 sent in this Boston Globe story about farming with salt-tolerant plants which can be irrigated with seawater.
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Saltwater Agriculture More

Saltwater Agriculture

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  • Re:Homer Simpson says... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You suck at keeping /. free of grammatical errors for 3 years.

  • Re:Is this News For Nerds? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I would rather see news such as this than more nonsense regarding napster. "Geeks" should be more globally concerned, think about the ethical concerns by scientists in the development of the atomic bomb. Oh well. Saying to be concerned to this crowd is pointless. Consider the literal tons of solid waste, chemicals used in the manufacturing of just one computer.
  • This may look like a Good Thing to Joe Sixpack, who only cares about whether he's gonna get some good food on the table, but it may be a potential Bad Thing.

    How will this affect regular, plants (non saltwater plants) and their use in the long run? Furthermore, if you remember your history, Rome was famous for salting Carthege's soil in the Punic Wars, thus ruining their land and making it impossible to farm on. Could our precious soil be damaged by mass use of salt water, especially if there is an irrigation error and it gets all over the place? I don't know if it's worth the environmental risks just so a few food corporations can make an extra buck off the unused land. The environment would be best left preserved and allowed to thrive instead of being worn out by man's overuse.
  • Many nations in southeast asia and the pacific historically considered dog to be a delicacy. In Tahiti, there's still a large feral dog population, though they don't hunt and eat the dogs anymore. The missionaries put a stop to that.

    Now, I love my dogs dearly, and would never eat them myself, but tell me where in the bible does it say you can't eat a dog? I mean, supplanting a religion with human sacrifice and cannibalism to christianity is okay I guess, but there's no reason to tell a culture they can't eat dogs because it makes idle rich pet owners in europe squeamish.
  • Yeah, well the native population brought the dogs with them when they originally settled the islands. Specifically as a source of food. Along with pigs, and chickens. Instead of domesticating them, they realized, hey, we're on an island, where are they going to run to? So they let them run wild.

    Actually, it's kind of strange, because the dogs do not attack people, not even children. The people beat them, so the dogs stay away from them. About the only annoyance they pose is getting into the garbage. (just like my dogs). But the strange thing is, you look at these dogs, and they look like they're well taken care of. Clean coats, no obvious parasites, they don't look like they're starving. The only clue that they're not someone's pet is that there's no collar.
  • Hm. I have a carton of Kyushu milk in my left hand here... Doesn't say anything about it being repulsive. They don't seem to have any trouble selling them at my local supermarket either.

    And seaweed is used in countless products in the USA. Mainly as an emulsifier in things like ice cream and toothpaste. (read the ingredients carefully!)

  • Ayup. The red-brown short haired (dingo-like) dogs are the best eating. The whitish gray dogs are said to be gamey tasting.

    In Korea, they farm dogs for food. Part of the process is to beat the dogs periodically so the meat stays tender. Brutal, but true. Not nearly as brutal as killing a cow kosher-style, but brutal all the same.

  • Hmm. Like seaweed? (Score:3)

    by Squeeze Truck ( 2971 ) <xmsho@yahoo.com> on Saturday March 17, 2001 @06:14PM (#358273) Homepage
    Saltwater agriculture has been going on here in Japan for hundreds of years.

    In fact, you might have heard that this year we had an especially bad seaweed harvest in the Ariake Sea, which is not 10 kilometers from my house.

  • Re:cool project (Score:3)

    by Squeeze Truck ( 2971 ) <xmsho@yahoo.com> on Saturday March 17, 2001 @06:37PM (#358274) Homepage
    Is it harvested right from the ocean? Do they need to build special aquariums? Sounds expensive to harvest to me, but I could be wrong. Maybe that's why beef is more easily accessable in Michigan than seaweed

    Basically, for seaweed farming you have a very large net that you lay out under the water. The mesh is about 15 cm square. Then you let the seaweed grow right on the net. When there's enough, you just go out in your boat and haul the net and the seaweed in together.

    It doesn't need to be warm to grow, but it may need to be salty. It is also a bad idea to build sea-retaining walls, as this allows plankton such as Red Tide to flourish which compete directly with the seaweed for food. That seems to have been the cause of this years' bad harvest.

  • An added benefit is that the phytoplankton growth captures CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby reducing global warming.
    [...]
    conclusion: Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.


    But that CO2 taken from the air is released at least partially when they are consumed. It's not as if CO2 is incorporated into jungle trees that are left in a standalone cycle or as if it's subducted under the Earth crust
    __
  • The level of soil salinity will not go up over time. It will reach a constant level probably very similar to the water salinity, since it appears they keep pumping water through this farm.
  • Do you live in Japan? I know they farm kelp there.

    The reason why it is not used more in foods, is because of tradition. The decision as to what is edible and what is not appears to mainly be a cultural one. In parts of Africa for instance, the locust is considered a delicacy.

    In europe the majority of the population would not be capable of putting a living locust in their mouth and chewing on it, no matter what you offer to pay them.

    I've read somewhere that in Japan the idea of drinking milk from an animal is considered a disgusting idea, but I don't know if this is true.
  • Milk advertising is a massive success story in PR. When I was a kid, we were force fed milk at school, because society believes it is healthy. I hated the stuff with a vengeance. I was always looking for tricks to avoid having to drink that horrible fatty goo (dropping it, spitting in it, hiding in the playground, pretending to be ill, just so I wouldnt have to go to kindergarten and drink milk). I was ready to kill the teachers or the other toddlers if I thought that would spare me the fate of having to drink milk for just one day. Nothing worked. Society saw the product as some sort of essential medicine or vitamin, without which a child wouldn't grow. Full of calcium? Bollocks. There's just as much calcium in tap water. The white colour is caused by microscopic droplets of fat. Milk is full of fat. It's full of sugars only a baby can digest. Feed your kid fruit juice, it's healthy, full of vitamins, no fat, less sugar than there is in milk, and it tastes nice and sweet. I'm not a vegetarian by the way, just someone who has hated milk all his life :)
  • Because balanced diets require more land, more water, and more fertilizer to produce, with a net result of fewer calories per acre and per dollar. If carrot-growing was locally practical, they'd already be eating carrots.
    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • Every famine on Earth since 1935, and every famine on Earth in an industrialized state since 1875, has occured in a country either at war or with government-run food production, or both. Every single one. No exceptions.

    Care to reconsider your position?

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • After more than 30 years of restless research, Carl Hodges, an atmospheric physicist from the University of Arizona,
    [...]
    The world's supply of saltwater is virtually unlimited,/blockqu

    --

  • I already eat quite a bit of seaweed

    The Salicornia mentioned in the article is not a seaweed but a salt-tolerant ``normal'' plant...

    // Klaus
    --

  • Yay (Score:1)

    by BiGGO ( 15018 )
    Now I can grow pickles!


    ---
  • ... for now. What about in 30 years? 50? someone has to think of the long term. In the short term, the problem comes down to distribution. In the long term, the problem will be production, unless a large part of the worlds population decides to stop reproducing. I, for one, do not think that is going to happen. So we will need golden rice, saltwater farming, and any other solutions people think of which will work. Now, we see those solutions coming along.

    I do agree that we need to take care of the short-term problem as well. Right now, it is the most important issue. Still, finding additional solutions to the long-term problem is a Good Thing (tm).

    .sig

  • Salicornia (Score:4)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday March 17, 2001 @12:11PM (#358285) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • I thought it was an interesting article to read. This puts "innovations" like one-click shopping nicely into perspective. It is good to see that there are still some sane people out there...
  • I'll take milk over fruit juice any day - I've always liked the taste (not from those little paper pint containers, though - real plastic or glass bottles only). I also don't like anything less than 2%, and I prefer whole milk - fat and sugar are the two items that make food taste 'better'. I'm not lactose intolerant, and I'm certainly not forcing anyone who is to drink it, but hey - a glass of milk helps *calm* my stomach, as bad as it may be to others. I can't stand cranberry juice, but one of my friends (who is lactose intolerant) loves the stuff... go figure 8^)

    Good thing there are lots of beverage choices, with plenty of ways to get the nutrition we need... kind of like Guinness vs. Midwest "beer" (Miller/Bud/Pabst/etc) - to each his own.

    --
  • In terms of "impacting" the weather...

    Everything we do impacts the weather. Asking whether or not increasing the surface area of land covered by seawater by even ten thousand square miles (which would take a VERY long time) would have no effect on the global climate. Locally, this design in particular seems to be a manmade river flowing back into the ocean. The overall effect would only be to possibly increase the humidity, which is hardly the end of the world...
  • >I've read somewhere that in Japan the idea of drinking milk from an animal is considered a disgusting idea, but I don't know if this is true.

    It might be, but most of the non-white world is lactose intolerant after growing out of infancy.

    To most of the world "Cheese" is spoiled milk which actually makes you ill.

    Later,
    ErikZ
  • >Imagine a world with no Hunger

    Ok, this hunger thing. It is NOT a problem with not having enough food, it has everything to do with getting the food to the hungry people. America alone has the production to feed the entire world if it had to.

    Politics causes world hunger.

    Later,
    ErikZ
  • Salt accumulation, which has ruined farmers in the Aral Sea basin and California's Imperial Valley, isn't a problem. The plain and underground water table are already salty, and the constant flushing of irrigation, Hodges says, ensures that the fields won't exceed the salinity of the water
  • Which is why i think food production should be a gov't thing. Everyone gets a certain amount reguardless, and if you want more then that amount, you can buy it.
  • I was trying to remember those that can't or aren't working at the moment. In this day and age, its ridiculous for anyone to starve.
  • Yes, that would be a socalist thing. But for the basics (food, water, clothing) i think its the way to go. For some things, socialism is not a bad way to do things.
  • Care to back up your claims with proof? From what i understand, food shortages are occuring b/c farming is big buisness. Take India for example. Lets also not forget that big buisness likes to redefine 'production' so that areas making enough food for themselves through traditional methods look like they are producing nothing.

    War will cause famine for sure. I'm willing to bet the reason for famine with gov't run food production is b/c the gov't was concerned with feeding itself, not its people.
  • Yes, talking about food production on a story about food production is off topic..
  • The land is WORTHLESS! It's DESERT!!!!

    Sure, but this guy is claiming global impact for this approach to agriculture. To be rational, you must take the ratio of current agricultural production land area to the land area he is going to be opening up to production with adjustements for productivity per area. His land areas might be more productive per acre than existing agricultural land area, but even so:

    How much of the earth's surface is such "worthless" coastal property? How much of that property is "worthless" because of human activities like deforestation that might better be reforested? How long is the such property going to remain "worthless" as residential real estate? Of the remainder, how much population can it feed, when totally developed?

    Then there is the environmental question of how much of the world's biodiversity exists in coastal aquatic ecosystems?

    Then you have to ask yourself:

    How much of the earth's surface is open ocean where there is presently very little biodiversity?

  • CO2 taken from the air is released at least partially when they are consumed

    Yes. I think it is safe to say even most of the initially sequestered CO2 is released back to the air. The portion that is not released back to the air tends to fall as sediment to the bottom of the ocean where, while it may not be subducted, at least becomes part of a very large buffer. I don't have the numbers on the expected size of that buffer, but we are talking about one of the largest geological features on earth:

    The ocean floor.

  • Coastal vs Open Ocean (Score:4)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Saturday March 17, 2001 @07:10AM (#358299) Homepage Journal
    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 [earthrise.com] 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 [sjsu.edu]. 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.

  • Magnetic treatment of water? Change the physio-chemical characteristics of natural water? That's a load of horsesh*t - sorry, I take that back - horsesh*t is healthier for the soil than this kind of crap.
  • You might not be interested in it but it is a positive use of knowledge, science and technology. I like to hear things that show that we can make the world a better place without returning to the 17th century.
    I understand that, early in the 20th century, people felt that science & technology would make the world a better place. 2 World wars dispelled this idea and for the last couple of decades we were told to forget all that c**p and get back to nature. Apparently we needed to forget all the things that had already improved the world, like medicine, western engineering and internal combhustion engines.
    This guy is using science and engineering to make a desert/war-zone into somewhere that you can get food.
  • unfortunately the reason we have so much food is that moder industrial agriculture produces higher efficiency at the expense of sustainability, leading to the loss of topsoil due to higher erosion rates in factory farms, salinisation due to extensive irrigation, etc etc. These factors combined with the probable impact of global climate change could make the world a very hungry place.
  • We already have ecotourism and have numerous protected zones where corel reefs are able to grow without human tinkering. Infact our main source of income for our country is tourism, and most of those who come here are divers. We need technology like this to look into other areas of income.

  • This could indeed be very valuable for our country , Maldives, which is covered by 99% sea. With only 1% of land, farming has never been done extensively. Most of our food is imported from outside and or is just fish. That means we don't have a rich diet of vegetables filled with minerals. If we can develop sea farming here miles and miles of knee deep lagoons can be used for sea farms like this. Almost every island has a large lagoon encicling it. And with more than 1100 islands we do have a lot of room for sea farming. This could be great for exporting and consuption here too. Minerals and fiber will be included in our diet, which for ages have been lacking.


  • The only negative impact I can think of is the salting of a large amount of land. That would make it unusable for conventional farming, but desert coastlines are already unfarmable. We might also have to preserve some desert species from extiction if the earth starts to run out of desert...

    I heard about a project awhile back to see if it was possible to feed people with just seaweed, rainwater, and fish. The idea was to colonize the oceans. Do you know what became of that? I would be very interested to know.

    If it didn't pan out because of a nutrient deficiency, maybe this salt-tolerant plant might help fill the gaps. With a diet that high in salt, I wonder how the blood pressure would react?
  • Yeah I know, but thanks for being helpful.
    .oO0Oo.
  • The farm itself has it's own website

    http://www.seawaterfarms.com/

    trust me? [seawaterfarms.com]

    .oO0Oo.
  • I'm not sure but now you mention it, it does sound expensive.

    As for cattle feed. We've seen the consequences of that here in Europe with Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis which was brought to cattle via cheap feeds. Would you believe that it's impossible to find out what is in pelletted cattle feeds in Europe. Manufacturers have no obligation to specify ingredients on packaging.

    One investigation discovered that the pellets were made from dried chicken droppings. Mmm shit fed beef, sounds lovely.

    .oO0Oo.
  • The land in the article is already salt based. the water table is saltwater not fresh so the salt in the seawater has no effect.

    http://www.seawaterfarms.com/

    is the projects URL

    Last time I looked the blood pressure / salt correlation was cast into doubt as the people in the study who ate plenty of salt also had high fat diets. I've not seen any subsequent info. so please feel free to correct.

    I'm no biologist but isn't the salt content of the body regulated by osmosis? If so then wouldn't excess salt be excreted?
    .oO0Oo.
  • gosh how clever
    .oO0Oo.
  • No, I live in UK but for ten years I've not eaten meat or dairy products. Consequently I know more about what's in my food than most people.

    Seaweed is used to create creamy textures and, as I said, bind other food particulates together. I also eat it in it's raw form and use it as an ingredient in my own cooking.

    Tradition is a difficult thign to break. Many people I encounter think that not drinking milk is ridiculous and yet they don't even know what's in it when you ask them. Much of it's so called goodness is added afterwards. It's got vitamin d made from fish oil for instance.

    http://www.milksucks.com/
    trust me? [milksucks.com]

    And yes it is disgusting.
    .oO0Oo.
  • -1 Redundant
    no not offtopic, a commentary on how many times a vegetarian has to hear the "cruel to plants" thing.
    .oO0Oo.

  • cool project (Score:3)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @11:42PM (#358313) Journal
    I already eat quite a bit of seaweed (both raw and procesed into higher level foods) and have often wondered why it isn't used more in foods. You can use the gummy nature of it's structure to bind other foodstuffs and so alleviate the need for eggs and dairy. Dairy and poultry farming is energy intensive as well as cruel and consumes freshwater. Growing cereals to feed them to cows is stupid in effeciency terms.

    It's great to think that the environmental effect is positive too. I wonder what the downside is, there always is one somewhere.

    Using the tanks is a cool sword into ploughshares scheme, I'll have to get one for my aquarium.
    .oO0Oo.
  • Read the article and all your questions are discussed and answered.
  • Not to mention it gives clues to how the ME can still make money after the oil wells dry up... Derek
  • Did you read the article, beyond the title? It would seem not.

    The project is located on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea, ie Ethiopia. Desert man, desert. And as the article states, the water tables are already salinated. No one is suggesting irrigating grain fields with saltwater.

    25,000 miles of desert coast worldwide. 10,000 acres per farm, potential of $1 million an acre in income. All from already unproductive land and previously useless salt water. In short, this is a phenomenal breakthrough if its viable.

    Derek

  • Milk (Score:1)

    by zsazsa ( 141679 )
    Growth hormones or not, I've been a milk junkie since I've been a kid. I've slowly weaned myself from 2% to skim, and I still love the stuff. Don't tell me that it can't be good for me.

    zsazsa
  • Dr. Hodges solution appears to be a combination of several farming techniques that maximize the usefulness of each byproduct. He is referring to creating these farms in areas that are not already mangrove swamp areas and are located near sea-water so the problems of soil and ground water salination are moot.

    "A coastal plain made barren by deforestation and desertification is springing to life with vital economic activity, new mangrove wetlands, and nearly 150 bird species."

    It is not a requirement for these farmers to maximize shrimp production for cash, thus the need for antibiotics in a stressed mono-culture environment, it is an attempt at a balanced sustainable production of many consumable products without the waste of usable byproducts.

    You may not be able to feed "The World" with these techniques, but to create a better place for these local people is a step in the right direction.
  • Well if there are any trees growing locally in dried up creek beds, & they all start to die off, your question's been answered.
  • &gtGrowing cereals to feed them to cows is stupid in effeciency terms

    It's also expensive,
    That's why farmers AVOID paying for feed whenever possible. For Example, my Uncle raises feeder calves down South where feeding them is almost free. Cattle graze off the fast growing grass. After they grow big enough, its actually profitable to ship them up north to Michigan where there is a stronger market for cattle.

    By the way, How expensive is Seaweed? Is it harvested right from the ocean? Do they need to build special aquariums? Sounds expensive to harvest to me, but I could be wrong. Maybe that's why beef is more easily accessable in Michigan than seaweed.
    ;-)
  • I didn't read the article so this may not make sence. But I'm not sure but if you start irrigating with sea water. Won't the soil get saltier and saltier because of this? Because every time you irrigate with sea water the salt will "stay" in the soil. And at the end the soil may get too salty because of this? They should put the plants in large cisterns or something then, to filter the salt out from time to time. Ow well.
  • News for turf. Salt that matters.
  • Wow...I thought up PART of this a ways back and did some research on it... Seems there are at LEAST a few people who were attempting to Grow shrimp in a controlled habitat for consumption...

    Background:
    In Florida, People hated the Mosquitos.
    People loved eating shrimp.
    People Drained off swamps to build Places to eat and shop and live (and to get rid of Mosquitos).

    Here's the kicker...
    SHRIMP EAT MOSQUITOS.

    Smaller mosquito population=Smaller shrimp population.
    People get angry that shrimp prices climb and they can't see why...

    So someone finally figured out that it's all connected, and they built a SYSTEM to account for it all. Sure---Dragonfly's are thrown in to eat the Mosquitos, but those die too. You can't eliminate a part of the system without repurcussions, because to keep it functioning WELL, the chain of events/actions needs to be contiguous. So they substituted a longer chain in place of the singular link. MORE DIVERSITY IS GOOD.

    Throw in enough of a variation of elements at differing levels, and a system will eventually come to some sort of equilibrium (approximately) to allow it to survive. Without the key factors, though, it all comes to a grinding stop.
    Unfortunately, it generally takes such a HUGE number of factors to comprise a fully functioning system, it's hard to take everything into effect when you try to build a new one.

    And THAT's why shrimp farming didn't work, and now apparantly does....I think.
    Mmmmmmm....barbecued shrimp.....

  • better links, etc. (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Saturday March 17, 2001 @03:37AM (#358324) Journal
    It looks like they have figured out how to handle the economics of the situation, etc. They even have a website called www.seawaterfarms.com [seawaterfarms.com] of all things. It is the name of the company.

    Here are some details, but there is much more in the original newspaper article and on their website:

    In 1967, Hodges, then 30, looked ahead and started to worry about how the world could feed a rapidly growing population. Just 3 percent of all water is fresh, and only half of that is attainable. He established the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona that year and began looking for solutions. Desalination, he soon realized, might never be economically viable. That conclusion set him thinking in a new direction: Why not see what grows in saltwater? A practical answer to that question, some scientists have suggested, would mark a great step forward in human welfare. ''The single most important biological contributions to world peace will be to produce plants which grow effectively in quite salty water,'' the British mathematician Jacob Bronowski argued nearly half a century ago.

    Salt accumulation, which has ruined farmers in the Aral Sea basin and California's Imperial Valley, isn't a problem. The plain and underground water table are already salty, and the constant flushing of irrigation, Hodges says, ensures that the fields won't exceed the salinity of the water. Nutrients from the effluent, meanwhile, do build up, improving soil fertility over time.

    He has got a whole biological cycle figured out.

  • It might be possible and it sounds very beneficial if it could be done, BUT it certainly does not sound at all practical. This was done near enough to the Red Sea that the water could flow into the farm via a man-made river. The water would have to be continually brought in. The system to replicate this a great distance from the ocean would probably be astronomically expensive. And would it even work at such a scale? Could one bring large amounts of saltwater inland and properly contain it, now allowing it to affect surrounding ecosystems?

    The article hypes it as a very profitable system. While it may not be as profitable as oil, the technology to pump large quantities of liquid are readily available and affordable if this farm really can make money.

  • Killer-AG (Score:3)

    by Samedi1971 ( 194079 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @11:33PM (#358326)
    This could be an incredible opportunity for third-world nations. Although a lot of research has gone into the planning, I didn't see anything in the article that implied that it couldn't be implemented in low-tech environments. It should also be easy for poor countries to secure loans for food production projects.

    It could also be applied to landlocked nations that have large brackish marshes. It would mean more study, but there are plenty of flora and fauna species that thrive in semi-salty water.

    Perhaps oil-rich middle east countries can afford to pump large quantities of seawater to low areas (possibly as far as landlocked oil-poor african nations?).

    This will be very interesting and exciting to follow.

  • Hmmm. Salty. Uggghhh!!
  • Actually, most irrigation techniques will result in a buildup of salts in the soil. Even freshwater contains some amount of dissolved salts, these slowly buildup in the soil over time as the some water evaporates from the surface.

    Such is probably the fate of all civilizations that utilize heavy irrigation. Some think this may have led to the downfall of some early irrigation dependent civilizations.

    Here is my best karma-whoring offering [usda.gov]
    for the goatse-phobic crowd go to:
    http://www.ussl.ars.usda.gov/salinity.htm
  • People make this mistake often - there is no shortage of food.

    It's mainly economic. Both China and India produce enough food to feed themselves. The world's food supply exceeds demand. There is no simple x=y equation, which lets the food get distributed to the hungry. The problem is that the demand side doesn't have the money to buy the food. No matter how much more you produce, they still won't be able to buy it.

    Over the past few years, the European Union has dumped tons of excess butter, and recently North Korea asked for the quasi-mad cows being destroyed to be sent over there. The problem is that if a country does that, the prices go down.

    Sure, salt water agriculture is a good thing, and it helps in areas that suffer in that particular niche area. But calm down if you think it will produce the food that the world needs - there's already more than is needed. People just don't have the economic means to buy it.

    Why? Because of economic infrastructure, development, industrialization, subsidies, trade, etc. All this talk about golden rice, genetically engineered food, etc. distracts from a very simple fact. We already have enough food.

    w/m

  • The point isn't to do this at a distance from the coasts. Reread the article, especially this bit;

    The world has 25,000 miles of desert coast. "If we could develop the coasts" [Hodges] reasons, "we could feed billions.

    His goal was to provide a good way to farm along the coast, in areas where the soil wasn't very good for growing. He wasn't trying to create a new method of farming in landlocked areas.

  • From the article:

    "Salt accumulation, which has ruined farmers in the Aral Sea basin and California's Imperial Valley, isn't a problem. The plain and underground water table are already salty, and the constant flushing of irigation... ensures that the fields won't esceed the salinity of the water.

    In other words, he thinks he's got it figured out. Whether it's true remains to be seen - ask again in 5 years.

  • That last quote sounds very, very Scientologific. (That is the wierdest word I have ever used in my life...) XENU XENU XENU! :D Bahumat

  • Mr. CyberElf, did you actually read the article? The project intends to provide agricultural options for land that is not normally fertile. The whole point here is using salt water to open up new, more environmentally sound ways of cultivating food.

    besides, how many transnational super-global-mega-corps are going to waltz in and start salt water farming in Eritrea? The country is quite unstable.

  • All over the world, mangroves and salt marshes are being destroyed for shrimp farming. Thing is, natural coastal wetlands convert sunlight into food at a higher rate than any other ecosystem. They are breeding grounds for shrimp and lots of marine species. The artificial shrimp breeding grounds are dependent on inputs of large amounts of food gathered from elsewhere - shrimp farms can produce more shrimp per acre (or hectare, if you prefer) but they do this by requiring the indirect use of lots of farm land (corn and soy meal) or the ocean (capelin meal).

    If irrigating with salt water on dry land, some of the water will evaporate, and the salt will become hypersaline, which imposes an energy cost on all plants ... ever hear of the Dead Sea? Hypersalinity is to blame. Growing plants with salt water could work, as long as they are in the ocean or otherwise kept from getting too salty. How much energy would it cost to pump a few trillion gallons of salt water up onto land? Then grow genetically engineered tomatos for starving people in the third world? Forget it.

    People in Asia have been growing ocean vegetables (aka 'seaweed') for a long time. Maybe that is not as hi-tech and mediagenic, but it makes more sense.

  • If you have lots of shallow water in the tropics, coral reefs make more sense than the hi-tech scheme that was proposed. In addition to fish and shellfish for human consumption, there is scuba based ecotourism. Most coral reefs have a biodiversity higher than rainforests, and play a role in the basic maintainence of global ecosystems. If an area of shallow water isn't suitable for coral reefs, growing ocean vegetables (aka 'seaweed') is a proven method for salt water agriculture. Japan and China have huge areas with floating or submersed frames that are implanted with ocean vegetables - sushi anyone??.

  • Top of last quote was mine, got it in the wrong spot. This puny text box isn't the easiest thing to write long posts in.

    --

  • A problem to contend with in shrimp farms in California is that the water must be cycled. Any high concentration of a single species is the perfect breeding ground for parasites and deseases which will ravage these farms, in time. They need more variety of plants, like present crop rotation to prevent exhausting the soil of key nutrients, also prevent build up of harmful byproducts. Even plants create waste, which other organisms usually consume. This is sustainablilty, not just talking enhancement.
    The world has 25,000 miles of desert coast. ''If we could develop the coasts,'' he reasons, ''we could feed billions.''

    I'd like to see this math, please. So far the ground up seeds, oil, fish and shrimp seem to translate into fried seafood business. Mrs. Pauls feeds the world? Big assumption is that that 25,000 miles is all available for this sort of thing. Probably a good chunk, but it sounds sensational.

    Seawater Farms is slated to cover more than 10,000 acres

    This really isn't very large, when you think about it, but should provide some food and employment for a country which needs it.

    Ok, this Hodges fellow had a light go on about 30 years ago, nice. Let's just not go assuming he's Albert Einstein and has all the answers. Further information on his background? Just what is an an atmospheric physicist from the University of Arizona is that anything like a meteorologist? Doesn't sound like an Ag guy to me, but hey, we all pick up things along the way.

    It is important to get the planet on a pathway to environmental enhancement.''

    ''The innocence of the project is also the beauty of it,'' said Ned Daugherty, a landscape architect from San Diego who is helping to build the farm. ''Everything has a purpose.''

    ''The human species is on the path to becoming the intelligence of the universe,'' Hodges said,...

    Why do quotes like these make me uneasy?

    --

  • My question is what happens to the salt ? Do the plants absorb it ? Because if they don't then the salt content in the soil will become very high. I don't know if the plants can stand *any* amount of salt or are just tolerant to a certain range of levels of salt ? If the salt level in the salt keeps on increasing it seems like this would thing couldn't go on indefinetly.

  • ...with a grain of salt.
  • I was thinking more along the lines of pre-salted popcorn. Just add butter.
  • I agree, except on the golden rice scheme: why wish for a rice only diet instead of a balanced diet or even just rice with a side order of carrots(or other vitamin A containing source)
  • Do you mean that selling golden rice rather than rice to gouverments so they can ship it to starving people in dictator/economic(free trade)slavery run countries is the best we can do and please don't sing the better than nothing song.
  • 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"

    Pardon me: Did you see this is the coast of Eritrea? The land is WORTHLESS! It's DESERT!!!! That's the whole point here! Taking worthless, unusable land and growing food! No one is suggesting tearing down beach houses for aquaculture. Sheesh.

  • Farming with salt water? That is HUGE. You can build a climate controlled green house, you can have artificial light and chemical fertilizer but you always need WATER to grow things. And lots of them. They are hard to "create" (water distillation plants or wait for nature to do its thing) and store (massive water towers if you don't have a reliable water source). And fresh water is NOT necessary an infinite resource [wri.org]! If you can rely on the sea, you are guaranteed a regular and reliable supply.

    Imagine a world with no Hunger... it got to be more "matter" than, say a drop in Napstar traffic [slashdot.org], don't you think?

    ====

  • Won't there be tremendous pressure to extend this technique to land where the water table isn't already salty?

    Suppose you are an official of a nation facing a food shortage. Will you really be able to resist opening up useless, but salt-free land to the technique? How about if you're the governer of a district with a clean water table and lots of useless land? A subsistance farmer in such an area? Salt irrigation spreads further and further inland, entire biosystems are poisoned, etc.

    Or maybe it works perfectly, coastal land feeds entire nations and makes them prosperous so that their birth rate drops to 1st world levels, and so on. I'd very much like to think so. But honestly, what's the track record with new crop technology ending third world hunger?
  • ''The human species is on the path to becoming the intelligence of the universe,'' Hodges said, satisfied that his farm marks a forward leap in that process.

    WTF? What universe does this guy live in? Certainly not mine. Granted, the farm is AMAZING. If this idea were to be economically viable, GREAT! We can feed BILLIONS! Good show!

    But...*THE* intelligence in the universe? C'mon buddy...you're a scientist. You honestly don't believe that...do you?

  • I don't get it...how? Shrimp are in teh water, mosquitos are in the air...do the mosquito's have to go for a swim, or do the shrimp have to start flying?
  • Downsides
    1. Your "poisoning" the lands with salt (bad environmental effect)
  • Neat ideas, but you're missing a couple of things.

    First, edible and nutritious crops that can be grown in salty soil and water are nothing new. Experiments with these sorts of crops date back to the 18th century, if memory serves.

    Of course, it wasn't until recently that cultivation of such crops became feasible using modern methodology and technology. The problem now is that large agribusinesses (such as Archer Daniels Midland) will lobby to kill or retard these technologies in the same way that oil businesses moved to kill or retard research into renewable energy resources: They will buy as many dirty politicians as they have to.

    Since the vast majority of politicians are dirty, and since agribusiness is rich, we'll probably never see these technologies make it out of the lab.

    OK,
    - B
    --

  • Most of the thoughtful and intelligent posters from /. have moved on to K5

    You mean like the intelligent and thoughtful poster who got this blatant piece of corporate propaganda [kuro5hin.org] on K5's front page recently? At least Slashdot's occasional failings are usually funny.

    Oh well, I did sign up over there, maybe it was just a fluke that it was twice as lame as any /. frontpage I've ever seen. Well, at least they fronted the story about /. and the scientologists. I guess I'll check them again later.

  • Even if salt-water farming were done on a very large scale, I very much doubt it would have any impact on global weather: the planet is already two-thirds covered with water. Where the global weather-machine is concerned, oceanic evaporation is the main factor. Even a fully-developped salt-water farming industry could only have a negligible impact on the global water-vapour budget, as is currently the case for the vast amounts of farm land under conventional irrigation.

    The impact on local weather could be significant, depending on the size of the areas under exploitation and the "natural" climate of the zone. You could possibly see an increase in cloud cover in some areas, but you're not going to start seeing rainstorms in the desert from the evaporation; deserts are what they are because they sit under areas of atmospheric subsidence in the global circulation. This would make it very difficult for thunderstorm-type convection to build up, even with an increased moisture input.

    So I, too, see this as a very interesting ray of hope. If there are downsides to it, they're not weather-related.

    --Help curb the spread of Foot-In-Mouth Disease

  • Interestingly many developed nations are already suffering from salinisation. This occurs when the water table floods due to unrestrained irrigation. The resulting rise in the water table forces salts to the surface making land useless for farming. In fact 1/3 of all californian agriculture is underthreat from salinisation. Thus these varieties of crops will enable this land to become productive again

  • Mangroves and erosion (Score:3)

    by mzweng ( 315862 ) on Saturday March 17, 2001 @07:35AM (#358353) Homepage
    Planting a mangrove farm sounds like a neat idea. The problem is, mangroves tend to trap sediment that's being transported in the longshore current. This can cause erosion problems later on down the line, since the amount of sediment in the current stays roughly constant, so the current picks up material from other places, causing the shoreline to retreat.

    Seawater Farms seems to have picked a good location for their project-- I don't think there's a lot of current activity in the Red Sea. But this project would cause big problems elsewhere-- for instance, California or Florida, where they are already having problems with shoreline erosion.

    For more info and links about coastal erosion, try http://www.haznet.org/text/erosion.html [haznet.org].
  • I would like to see the criterias used to decide what stories to post and what to reject... btw, you can mod me wherever you want for this comment...
  • Anyways, You can't bring water inland because you will have salt accumulation. It is clear in the article that because on the coast line, the underground water table is salty, the salt surplus will be flushed. You could not use this method inland.
  • Hey, how are you gonna deal with the salt? Salt will harden as stone, layer after layer.
    You don't let it build up to that concentration (salt is still soluble in water at several times the level found in seawater; witness the Dead Sea). You take the super-salinated water and drain it back into the ocean, where the salt came from in the first place.

    I wonder how many of these halophyte plants could be used for rehabilitating farmland lost to salt buildup from bad irrigation? If they take up salt in their tissues where it gets harvested and removed, you could use them to build organic matter in the soil at the same time you remove the excess salt.
    --
    spam spam spam spam spam spam
    No one expects the Spammish Repetition!

  • The effect of pushing agriculture into more and more marginal lands is not to save lives. Quite to the contrary: people will settle in these marginal lands and their populations will grow. But because this is agriculture pushed to its limits, the risk of crop failures is much higher than and good land that is farmed non-intensively. The net effect is that you will end up dealing with much larger populations at risk from famine than if you hadn't done this in the first place. And because such programs are so long term, you can't even make the argument that it saves lives of hungry people right now.

    The only solution to famine is to limit our population. We can do that voluntarily, through family planning, or nature will do it for us through "natural disasters". And the more marginal the lands are we inhabit, the more like, the more devastating, and the more frequent those natural disasters are going to be.

  • larval mosquitos live underwater. Mosquito eggs are laid in floating rafts [webmd.ca] on standing water. When the eggs hatch, the larvae live underwater and hunt insects. It is common to use gambusia fish to eat the larvae [pondsolutions.com] so they don't grow up to be bloodsuckers. Of course, this can present other problems [gambusia.net], too.
  • This will only work on a small scale. As the article states: The world's supply of saltwater is virtually unlimited, but salt stifles conventional crops and spoils topsoil. Using saltwater for irrigation will make the land impossible to use for other crops. Furthermore, it isn't necessary, since there are simple ways [khoorynyuri.com] to remove the salt from the water.

    There's also the question of Dr. Hodges' past experience. The article touts his 30 years of experience with shrimp farming in Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Despite this, it fails to note that even advocates of shrimp farming admit that the most economically viable shrimp farms have been environmental disasters [shrimpaction.com], and that there are serious concerns [colorado.edu] about shrimp farming in mexico

  • Great! At last I won't have to hunt for the salt shaker before I sit down to eat. But seriously, how do they plan to keep oil and other chemicals out of the farm? If anyone has a good idea please fill me in.
  • This could provide jobs where they are badly needed, provide food on otherwise unusable land, provide leather and buiding materials, create oxygen, and leave the land in better condition than it was in to begin with. This guy must be an alien, since I am not sure at this point that human beings could come up with something that has this much promise. My only real question is this: If this were done on a massive scale, using a lot of 'desert' land, could it impact weather conditions? Look at what large lakes or large swampy areas can do to the weather.
  • Perhaps oil-rich middle east countries can afford to pump large quantities of seawater to low areas (possibly as far as landlocked oil-poor african nations?).

    It might be possible and it sounds very beneficial if it could be done, BUT it certainly does not sound at all practical. This was done near enough to the Red Sea that the water could flow into the farm via a man-made river. The water would have to be continually brought in. The system to replicate this a great distance from the ocean would probably be astronomically expensive. And would it even work at such a scale? Could one bring large amounts of saltwater inland and properly contain it, now allowing it to affect surrounding ecosystems?

    The size of the pipelines/whatever to pump in the water would be the first in a very long series of problems. And simply getting so many countries to work together in bringing this pumping system through to its intended destination... I like the idea, but even if this current project is extremely successful, which sounds likely, it would be quite some time before anything like this could even be seriously considered.
  • irrigation with salt water over a number of years will ensure the land is totally screwed. the salts will build up to levels that even the salt tolerant plants will be unable to deal with.
  • Well, this guy claims that salinity levels in the earth never rise above salinity levels in the water. I'm terribly sorry I'm not competent to evaluate his claims from a scientific basis. However, that about the rusting tanks raised a little warning bell in me. There were also the things mentioned earlier... This guy CAN be a naive but brilliant visionary. Or, he might be setting up a trap for romantically-minded investors. I'd do more investigation before I put my money on this guy.
  • There were a couple of things that tipped me off. First, the rusting tanks. Second, the flowery language. Third, almost to good to be true. While breakthroughs do happen, investor scams happen too, and this sounds like one. I'll do an appraisal of the seawaterfarms page [seawaterfarms.com] and post my findings.

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