Saline Agriculture As the Future of Food 153
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."
Bioremediation (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Just curious... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just curious... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bioremediation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:vaporware.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Dont fight it, use it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:There is no global food production problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Just curious... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Parent is disinformative (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:vaporware.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Seasteading (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:There is no global food production problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Your ignorance astounds me (Score:3, Interesting)
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?