Dutch team is pioneering development of crops fed by sea water

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/18/humble-potato-poised-to-launch-food-revolution

by aaron695 • 12 years ago

125 30 12 years ago

cjensen• 12 years ago

Nice idea, but what about the Elephant in the Room? How do you eliminate the buildup of salt in the soil which can ruin the farmland?

jsonne• 12 years ago

Would hydroponics be efficient on a large scale like this?

bjelkeman-again5• 12 years ago

My limited experience of hydroponics tells me that it is economical for high value crops like vegetables, selling to a European or Californian market. Thera are hydroponic greenhouses which are 100+ hectare (250 acres), but for staple crops like potatoes I think it is going to be prohibitively expensive to try to grow in greenhouses with hydroponics.

If you are going to do hydroponics for veg and work with seawater then you can just as we'll go with the Seawater Greenhouse. http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

Possibly but that defeats the advantage of using salt water. Efficient operations need only a small fraction of the water used in traditional agriculture.

weego• 12 years ago

My takeaway from the article was that this was targeted at places where sea water contamination of farmland was a regular event, or where like in the northern areas of the Netherlands, keeping seawater off farmland is unsustainably expensive.

thret• 12 years ago

"So nine times out of ten the salt is retained in the leaves of the plant, so you’d have to eat many many kilos of potatoes before you’d exceed your recommended salt intake. But some of the salads are heavy with salt"

Then how are the leaves disposed of, I do not know. Fed to pigs or burnt perhaps, if they were simply used as mulch you would still wind up with a buildup of salt in the soil.

delinka• 12 years ago

Burning leaves a pile of salt. I, too, am curious where they expect the salt to disappear to.

ben0x539• 12 years ago

Maybe they can just dump them back into the sea.

lotsofmangos3• 12 years ago

Salt is worth money. If you have a bunch of salty leaves, you should be able to process them and get the salt out.

FranOntanaya• 12 years ago

Maybe they should bring the crops to the sea rather than bring the sea to the crops.

lotsofmangos3• 12 years ago

I've been wondering abut the viability of farming in floating polytunnels. They could even be temporarily submersible to weather storms.

cariaso• 12 years ago

You grow these GMO tomatos which thrive in salty soil and actively remove the salt by concentrating it in the leaves http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1092-genemodified-toma...

lifeformed• 12 years ago

What happens to the leaves? Do they also get harvested?

thinkling• 12 years ago

A lot of Dutch farming in greenhouses is already hydroponic, i.e. Little or no soil is involved.

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

Inspired by sea cabbage, 59-year-old Marc van Rijsselberghe set up Salt Farm Texel and teamed up with the Free University in Amsterdam, which sent him de Vos to look at the possibility of growing food using non-fresh water. Their non-GM, non-laboratory-based experiments had help from an elderly Dutch farmer who has a geekish knowledge of thousands of different potato varieties.

This is great. I'm not anti-GM, but let's be honest: traditionally grown vegetables have a much better marketing position. Being aided by a wise old farmer is an even better narrative.

Sebpereira• 12 years ago

There are very few species that have a high tolerance of salt, thus the idea, although good, has a limited range of uses. If you wanted to transfer the salt resistance of a potato to a lettuce you would need to use DNA splicing, making it a GMO. Also, it is true that most of the salt is retain on the leaf, but a good portion remains on the soil as small crystals, accelerating erosion of the field.

w1ntermute• 12 years ago

Wouldn't it make more sense to just improve desalination efficiency? This sort of biological engineering is a lot more difficult and has a lot more ecosystem-wide effects than improving desalination would.

bjelkeman-again5• 12 years ago

Increased salinity of soils is a big issue anywhere where groundwater is used for irrigation and there isn't much rain. Literally hundreds of millions of hectares are affected. [1]

We are probably going to have to attack the problem on many fronts simultaneously. If we could get efficient solar powered desalination, or something based on nano materials, that would be great [2], the current RO process is fairly energy intensive.

But you still have to deal with brine, and that is hard unless you are close to the sea. And if you are close to the sea and in a hot area, I'd personally go with Seawater Greenhouse technology instead. It has many side benefits, albeit probably not suitable for staple crops. [3]

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_salinity#Salinity_due_to... [2] http://www.kurzweilai.net/selective-nanopores-in-graphene-dr... [3] http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

Actually I think breeding salt tolerant plants would be significantly easier than trying to improve desalination. Although we still have the solve the problem of salt build up. But perhaps it will be easier to remove it from soil and plant matter than from water.

In any case the immediate application is to use it places where the soil is already salty. Better desalination wouldn't help there.

_sakura• 12 years ago

My parents visited his farm a few months ago, and told me that the potatoes don't taste salty at all. "Just like normal potatoes," they said, "they needed a little bit of salt added after baking for the taste." I'm hoping to visit it myself, if I have the opportunity next spring/summer. It's quite a spectacular start of rethinking food, imho.

Dutch team is pioneering development of crops fed by sea water

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