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."

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.

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.

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: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..

[LingNoi]

Here you go [youtube.com].

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.

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)