> After four decades of cross-breeding and genetic screening, researchers had developed eight separate species but their yields remained too low to make widespread cultivation worthwhile. But last year the team made a breakthrough by doubling the yield to more than 4.5 tonnes per hectare.
Wonder if this was a CRISPR project; seems like an exciting development if so, as perhaps the "brackish water resistant" gene could be inserted into other plants as well.
To me, the "... last year the team made a breakthrough by doubling the yield to more than 4.5 tonnes per hectare." part sounds like they changed tack from what they had been trying for the previous 4 decades.
Areas of Australia are affected by high salt levels in the soil [0].
Growing the strains of rice near the shores of saline lakes could perhaps be part of rehabilitation, in which rice crops reduce the saltiness of the land over time.
Are there any long-term consequences to dumping salt onto the sand? Does it accumulate, or do the deserts shift enough in the wind that it's not a problem?
Are they really just dumping it? Rice paddies are usually submerged entirely. If sea water is acceptable to these plants, one could conceivably just have a canal from the ocean feeding water in (and out), with some minor dams to handle tides. Less energy used than pumping and deals with the problem of salts left behind from evaporation.
Tidal mudflats don't seem to accumulate salt in the same way evaporative salt ponds do, since the water is not trapped allowing for concentration. So maybe something where tidal water is allowed to flush out overly saline water would work?
I think on hot days you are supposed to "flush" the rice fields with fresh (cooler) water anyway. The runoff then goes back to wherever (a river or in this case maybe the ocean). Assuming that is true, I imagine that means any relevant nutrients are not flushed out by this process.
Other obvious question given "started growing the crop in diluted sea-water" is what is the ratio? Combining the two, does the ratio increase over time due to salt accumulation?
Yes, we risk turning that wasteland into a desert! /s
Considering the crop's nature, we probably have to assume that it won't be used sand for maintaining rice puddles but rather clay or something which can hold water. For higher concentrations of salt partial desalination can be employed. AFAIK, it's only expensive to desalinate if you want drinking water levels, otherwise it's just some filtering. Also, we can expect continuous work on those varieties of salty water rice to eventually be able to support lower and lower desalination maintenance.
A wise old farmer told me once they're not manufacturing any more farm land. I always believed he was correct, but turns out thanks to science it's no longer true.
It looks to me, thanks to Chinese scientists, the world suddenly has a whole lot more farm land!
Sadly deforestation to make more farmland is still going strong, especially in tropical rainforests.
A simple thing that everyone can do to help is reducing/stopping meat and dairy consumption, because the additional farmland is used to produce livestock feed.
A mere 100 years ago pretty much everything that was for sale, food, clothes, tennis rackets, condoms (or what passed for one), ... was produced from animals.
You'd have to stop doing a hell of a lot more than merely stop eating meat to have any measurable impact.
Also what about the secondary effect ? If you stop eating meat, that will increase supply and reduce demand, and thus drop the price by a lot, which will lead to new customers, both for eating and other applications.
You really want to help ? Buy the rainforest, let it be rainforest. For bonus points, destroy the co2 certificates instead of selling them.
You would also have to protect the rainforest. There was a documentary about a guy who did this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKFJjkRZk6Q). And he had to spend a great deal of time (and flights) to try and stop people poaching the wood.
Another free market solution (well, kind of), is for the price of CO₂ to rise enough so it may be economically feasible to "buy the rainforest [to] let it be rainforest". This also should of course come with some mean of allotting taxed resources to the CO₂ consumers.
The seawater is diluted with fresh water (it doesn't give ratio).
Assuming they can get enough fresh water for the dilution, this might work for a limited number of cycles, but what I bet happens in Dubai is that after a period of time that salt builds up in the soil to the point they are unusable even irrigating with fresh water. Unless they can somehow leach the salt well below the root zone which may be possible. After all it is an arid desert and applying a shallow amount of brackish water to a large surface area will result in a lot of evaporation increasing salt content.
As far as we know from this article the ratio may be fresh:seawater, 99:1, I hate this kind of article, you keep hunting for that one piece of info that allows you to estimate the value of the discovery, and it never comes.
Maybe you are being sarcastic. In any case, the legend that the Romans have spread salt over the ground of the razed city of Carthage has no basis [1].
"Starting in the 19th century, various texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BC), sacking it, and enslaving the survivors. Though ancient sources do mention symbolically drawing a plow over various cities, and salting them, none mention Carthage in particular. The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modeled on the story of Shechem."
Wow, if we can grow more foods from sea water we could avert world hunger issues as fresh water becomes more scarce and requires more energy to extract.
Reverse osmosis desalination just about works with current food and energy prices, with solar bringing energy prices down, freshwater might not be a big deal in the future:
Converting hydrocarbon power into fresh water seems like a really great idea if you can completely externalize the cost of pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Israeli reverse osmosis plants are almost entirely powered by oil and natural gas. Clean energy desalination may be the goal, but reality is far from there yet.
In addition, there's the idea of using pressurized underground aquifers as an energy store (basically, using bending and lifting of the overlying rocks to store the energy when pressurized water is pumped underground). The pressure can be transfered to a clean seawater stream by a device called a pressure exchanger, which can then be fed into a reverse osmosis plant.
Constructing gas power plants costs a lot less upfront (~½) and uses almost 0 land by comparison. The site time for the construction should also be quite a lot less. So if you want X amount of power available in a certain place next year, new gas generation is a lot more straightforward.
I don't know the details, but didn't it take the Chinese more than 40 years to learn how to grow rice in such quantities? It was really primitive genetic engineering.
This reminds me of Incorporated (TV series), with a similar idea of using the deserts for seawater adapted crops. This is so fascinating to see being developed in real life and even more so to be marveled at in an exercise of forecasting the changes it ought to bring into the world. Just to pick a few such changes, this how the deserts will suddenly start worth something (and offer new reasons to be fought over, unfortunately). This is also how dramatic demographic booms took place over the history, so expect UAE to growth several times its current number of inhabitants; or next to it, in Saudi Arabia, expect a growth to something on the order of hundreds of millions!
Salt levels in food are largely guided by palate. If the amount of salt embedded in the harvested rice is significant relative to the overall sodium load of a typical meal, then its use will be limited to dishes that already contain added salt. In which case salt embedded in the rice will be largely offset by reduced amounts of added salt, keeping the overall dish in balance.
Also it should be noted that the link between high salt intake and negative cardiovascular health outcomes is disputed and is likely less significant than the current mainstream medical advice claims. (Like everything related to dietary science, the evidence on both sides of any argument is poor at best. So take it with a grain of salt. Ha.)
IIRC there's some kind of Evangelical prophecy about the ability to grow food in the desert being a sign of the apocalypse. This should go well with Trump's stance on Israel and unpredictability regarding nuclear strategy. ಠ_ಠ
Talk about trading your future for a relatively brief, near-term gain. This is just going to salt the land cumulatively until nothing will grow there, ever.
Yes, using saltwater is making a bad situation worse.
Much of the desert you just need to add fresh water and you can grow things. If you salt the land in the process, that's not going to be the case for long, even with brackish-tolerant species.
"Despite its aridity, the Mojave (and particularly the Antelope Valley in its southwest) has long been a center of alfalfa production; fed by irrigation coming from groundwater and (in the 20th century) from the California Aqueduct." [1]
We grow things in the desert, much of California would be dry desert land if not for simple irrigation - California grows a massive proportion of our food.
Wonder if this was a CRISPR project; seems like an exciting development if so, as perhaps the "brackish water resistant" gene could be inserted into other plants as well.