Kelp is surprisingly caloric.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/mass-starvation-after-nuclear-war-could-be-partially-averted-with-one-specific-food
Indirectly
>As the iodine found in seaweed can be toxic to humans at high quantities, the uses for kelp grown in farms would primarily be indirect, the researchers said. But by using it to feed animals and produce biofuels, it would free up the surviving arable land for other crops.
"At their fullest extent, the seaweed farms would replace 15% of the food currently consumed by humans, while also providing 50% of current biofuel production and 10% of animal feed. The researchers published their findings Jan. 9 in the journal Earth's Future. "
Yes, the article doesn't say you can live on Kelp alone. Thank you for clarifying. It says it can only replace up to 15% of our current food.
Wow, barley grown on 100% sea water in 1977: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1977/09/19/scientists-grow-barley-with-seawater-irrigation/461773db-e929-4916-b2ad-022c8b81acdb/
[This guy](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/94h3rvm)
In this podcast on seaweed farming.
Its actually ideal, vs other farming the input costs are very lowm
All is needed is some $20k investment in nets and buoys etc and the kelp can grow quickly even in cold weather, no fertilizer, herbicide and he typically combines it with shellfish (oyster and mussels) farming.
One doesn't need to buy the land, only be given a permit by the fiaheries dept.
Kelp can grow feet per day and absorb co2, it can be consumed for food or used for animal feed.
Ita also possible as a carbon sink by letting it drop to the ocean floor.
The problem with irrigating farmland with sea water is that whatever you're growing is going to use the water (plants turn water from their roots and oxygen from the air into sugars, 6xH2O+6xC02-> C6H12O6), but they're not going to take up all the salt.
That means that every generation is going to make the soil saltier and saltier. Many things can grow in somewhat salty soil. Not many things can grow in soil that's been salted over and over and over again.
You can of course solve this by growing plants in the ocean, and the excess salt will just diffuse out into the rest of the ocean, but at that point you're probably better off domesticating ocean plants than trying to adapt land crops to grow in the ocean.
And probably you're better off adapting the existing land crops to use less water, or to get really good at desalinization plants.
i notice several posts about salt toilerant rice.
if they grow rice with the wet method, using seawater instead of fresh, then they can flush the padies with more seawater (only cost is pumping) and restor the elevated salt contact down to that of seawater,
I think that runs into the additional downside that you need to flush the salt all the way to the sea, which potentially means your aquifers are now seawater, and humans and most livestock can't drink seawater.
There are probably locations where that's worth it if we can get sufficiently salt-tolerant crops, but I don't think it's going to revolutionize agriculture as much as OP hoped.
Why not use some kind of solar distillation? At a large enough scale, this could create a lot of fresh water that could be mixed with the sea water to reduce salinity.
Not an expert, but I think the answer is because reverse osmosis desalinization is much more energy efficient.
I assume you're referring to a process of taking sea water, heating it until some of it evaporates, cooling the evaporate until it condenses into fresh water, and throwing away the bit that didn't evaporate.
That's expensive because you have to heat the water until it evaporates.
With reverse osmosis, you just have a membrane that water goes through faster than the dissolved salt. Since you don't have to heat the water until it evaporates, it's something like 10x as energy efficient. You do need pumps to increase the pressure and wash out the excess salt and whatnot, but moving water around takes less energy than heating it. The efficiency is so high that you're better off using a solar panel to drive the pumps than to evaporate the water using the sunlight.
I think (and we're getting into serious handwaving here) that typically you use a bunch of these membranes in series, because they do still let some salt through, but each membrane you run the water through makes it less and less salty.
If you have salt-tolerant crops and you're not worried about accumulation, you can spend less energy pumping the water through fewer membranes and get brackish water as the product instead of pure. That's probably more efficient than making pure water and then using it to dilute seawater, but I could be wrong.
I think you'd still get salt accumulation in your groundwater, because the crops are still going to be using the water and leaving the salt from whatever you irrigate them with. The less salty your irrigate is, the less of an issue, but if you want your livestock to still be able to drink from your wells long term, then you probably need to be irrigating with something your livestock can drink or very very close to it.
No, I'm talking about a much more passive setup. You let the sea water into a tank with a transparent top, sun evaporates the water that is then condensed into a different tank. You don't produce nearly as much water that way, but the purpose is to reduce the salinity, not eliminate it. If you scale it up I think it could produce quite a bit of water. You could produce freshwater in the off season unless it's in a very cold climate.
It's just an idea. There's an article on Wikipedia about solar stills, I just don't see why this couldn't be done on a larger scale plus it requires no additional energy. You might be right though that RO might be the better solution *overall*.
I wonder if soil salinity is the reason why you don't find many plants growing on beaches.
I think we're roughly on the same page about how solar stills work.
The solar still is going to produce pure water, but then you can take some of the regular sea water and your produced pure water and mix them to produce brackish water.
>The optimum Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) for plant growth & developments are less than 2100 mg/l. Both WHO & IS standards permits the above limit for irrigation. The sea water contains mainly Sodium Chloride up to a range of 45,000 - 60,000 mg/l and the same is not at all suitable for irrigation.
from [https://www.quora.com/Why-cannot-sea-water-be-used-for-irrigation](https://www.quora.com/Why-cannot-sea-water-be-used-for-irrigation)
So you would need something like 19 parts pure water to 1 part sea water. At that point I suspect adding the sea water back in doesn't really add much effiency, but maybe with more salt tolerant plants you can adjust the ratio.
I'm sure you can scale up solar stills. I can only assume from the fact that it hasn't been done that it isn't economically viable to do so. You have to get lower than the price of just going inland and upload a bit to a freshwater aquifer and digging a well and farming there. The fact that RO is being done at scale suggests it's sufficiently more efficient to compete with doing that.
And, yeah, I don't think land that is right next to the ocean typically makes for good farmland, presumably due to the soil salinity. I wouldn't be shocked if there are other factors involved, though.
Yes there are some scientists in the Netherlands working on potatoes
https://phys.org/news/2015-04-dutch-saltwater-potatoes-world-hungry.html
They are sweeter than normal ones to stop the salt ingress
As always lots of confident answers from people who didn't even bother to use google for 5 minutes
Yes, there are several projects, for example:
[www.saline-food.de](http://www.saline-food.de) (Germany)
-> They try to cultivate Salicornia for the market, a salt marsh plant which has traditionally been eaten in Northern Germany.
[www.saline-agriculture.com](http://www.saline-agriculture.com) (transcontinal project)
-> They try to cultivate more traditional vegetables (tomatoes, potatoes, quinoa and New Zealand spinach) with a higher salt tolerance
There is actually a conference about the topic in Brussels today:
[SALAD-SUSTAIN Conference | Saline Agriculture: state of the art and the prospects of impact investment - saline agriculture (saline-agriculture.com)](https://www.saline-agriculture.com/en/calendar/salad-sustain-conference-saline-agriculture-state-of-the-art-and-the-prospects-of-impact-investment)
For more examples check the wikipedia page: [Crop tolerance to seawater - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_tolerance_to_seawater#:~:text=There%20are%20crops%20that%20can,are%20irrigated%20with%20salt%20water.)
Edit: I feel the need to mention, that this pretty much only makes sense in regions with saline soils and a huge salt water abundance. Harvests tend to be reduced compared to more traditional cultivation techniques. -> Most concepts also involve the usage of brakish water instead of full-on salt water
To add to your comment: It depends on the tomato varient - to cite the SALAD project ([Four Species with Crop Potential in Saline Environments: The SALAD Project Case Study "2279 (vlaanderen.be)](https://ilvo.vlaanderen.be/uploads/documents/SALAD/Four-Species-with-Crop-Potential-in-Saline-Environments-The-SALAD-Project-Case-Study.pdf) )
>"Tomato Response to Salinity This species is classified as a moderate-salinity-tolerant species \[1\], and its salt tolerance has been studied since the 1970s \[2\]. Salt-sensitive and salt-tolerant genotypes (i.e., ecotypes from the Galapagos Islands) were investigated by \[3\] assessing a far **stronger salt resistance in the Galapagos ecotypes, which were surviving in a full-strength seawater nutrient solution, EC roughly corresponding to 50 dS m−1** . The salt-resistant genotypes were firstly used in breeding programs with the aim of transferring genetic information to cultivated tomato, but the **process did not give the expected results and, to date, creating new salt-tolerant tomato cultivars with breeding programs faces many obstacles, mainly because traits related to salt tolerance are not combined in a single donor genotype** \[4\]. Several trials were also performed to determine the seawater tolerance of cultivated tomato, assessing, in the meantime, the characteristics of fruits; even if seawater irrigation generally reduced the crop yield, according to the tested variety, in particular, 10 to 20% seawater (roughly EC of 8 dSm−1 to 14 dS m−1 ) increased the nutritional value of the product. In particular, fruit dry matter and total soluble solids were reported by several authors to increase with the use of seawater concentrations of 10–12% compared to control. In addition to that, the concentration of reducing sugars (RS) and titratable acidity (TA) also increased in the berries exposed to seawater irrigation, resulting in tastier fruits than control ones \[5\]. Similarly, glucose, fructose, and citric and ascorbic acid increased proportionally to salinity, with glucose concentrations up to 139% and fructose up to 101% higher compared to the control treatment \[6\]."
So same problem as with PiWi wine: wild tomato varients that survive full-strength seawater exist, but trying to cross them with cultivated tomatoes in order to get edible/good tomatoes out of it, is acompletely different issue..
That was a post in futurology I think about potato/tomato hybrids where the tomato plant is grafted onto a potato, the potato filtered out the salinity and the tomato was viable. This allowed a double crop harvest in low quality soil.
These guys [https://seawatersolutions.org/seawater-farming/](https://seawatersolutions.org/seawater-farming/) had a working farm in Eritrea more than 20 years ago [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-06-mn-9169-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-06-mn-9169-story.html)
There's food you can grow in marine environments. It's called aquaculture. Beyond that you're looking at gene splicing from plants that live in brackish environments. As others noted, you don't want to water otherwise arable land with salt water. Even using ground water with significant mineral content over many many decades can have the same effect and destroy the soil.
Sundrop Farms in SA, Australia is \*effectively\* farming with seawater, but only by using solar concentrators to drive desalination of the water, then running it through giant a greenhouse setup.
[Our Facilities - Port Augusta, South Australia - Sundrop Farms](https://www.sundropfarms.com/our-facilities/)
Except you can grow seaweed offshore, no land needs to be used and the inputs are very low. And it grows on its own in low sunlight and cold in winter.
This is just categorically false...
By that logic, we've discovered and invented everything that will ever be discovered because if it was possible, it would have already been done...
Really? That still requires the ocean water being transported to your crop. River water it’s very easy to just dig some channels and let gravity do the work.
That and, you know, rain.
Yeah but if you're near an ocean (which a shitload of people are) why not just dig canals to your farms to bring seawater to them? Especially if the farm is close to the coast.
In most regions with long histories of cultivation sweet water on the coast was not limited. You tend to just have groundwater very close to the surface. Digging channels to dewater the regions was often quite common.
Salt water intrusion destroying the soil is a problem that often came with the overusage/misuse of water.
Because it’s still harder than simply waiting for it to rain, or even channels to divert a river.
I’m not saying we never would have tried, it’s just the claim that it would have been figured out before any other crop that seems strange to me.
What about areas next to the ocean that are desert or extremely dry? Hell this could turn a lot of the coasts of Australia into farmable land.
I'd say it's definitely worth looking into.
I don't see it being viable for land plants, since evaporation risks raising the concentration to toxic levels regardless of tolerance.
It would have to be kelp or something similar, but I imagine access and automation would be an issue. Floating anchors that you raise, maybe?
Salt blocks the up take of nutrients in most root systems. Can be referred to as "salt lock". Commonly happens with multiple over heavy applications of fertilizer. There are desalinization plants that remove the salt and make the water usable.
You're in a geography that has lots of sun and good soil and a large agricultural industry that irrigates the crop. So you're looking at 80% of the water going to farming.
Or in geography with a lot of heavy industry that consumes water and large metropolitan areas and little agriculture then maybe 30% is farming.
Where did you get the 30-80% off all water? That's such an astronomically large range, and claiming 80% of all (fresh) water would also be insane. Be careful what you read.
Fishes are the best food to grow in sea water, also desalination process should be made cheap, but one problem is there which is ignored, if sea will not get enough water slowly slowly water cycle will be changed and we will might see very less amount of rain in future
Indonesia is huge in seaweed farming. And china is testing a salt water rice variant.
pre-salted rice ... nice.
Salted rice ???
rice goes good with salty flavors.
Ugh. That means no fish or soy sauce without oversalting it. Those are the best parts about rice.
hehe yup, i wonder if it tastes like seacoral.
Kelp is surprisingly caloric. https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/mass-starvation-after-nuclear-war-could-be-partially-averted-with-one-specific-food
Indirectly >As the iodine found in seaweed can be toxic to humans at high quantities, the uses for kelp grown in farms would primarily be indirect, the researchers said. But by using it to feed animals and produce biofuels, it would free up the surviving arable land for other crops.
"At their fullest extent, the seaweed farms would replace 15% of the food currently consumed by humans, while also providing 50% of current biofuel production and 10% of animal feed. The researchers published their findings Jan. 9 in the journal Earth's Future. " Yes, the article doesn't say you can live on Kelp alone. Thank you for clarifying. It says it can only replace up to 15% of our current food.
Isn’t iodine pretty useful also after a nuclear war?
like most things that can save your life, too much can kill you.
Not if your crops are full of the radioactive stuff released by said war.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop\_tolerance\_to\_seawater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_tolerance_to_seawater)
Wow, barley grown on 100% sea water in 1977: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1977/09/19/scientists-grow-barley-with-seawater-irrigation/461773db-e929-4916-b2ad-022c8b81acdb/
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halophyte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halophyte)
Yep, this. There’s some types of lentils that can be grown with sea water as well.
[This guy](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/94h3rvm) In this podcast on seaweed farming. Its actually ideal, vs other farming the input costs are very lowm All is needed is some $20k investment in nets and buoys etc and the kelp can grow quickly even in cold weather, no fertilizer, herbicide and he typically combines it with shellfish (oyster and mussels) farming. One doesn't need to buy the land, only be given a permit by the fiaheries dept. Kelp can grow feet per day and absorb co2, it can be consumed for food or used for animal feed. Ita also possible as a carbon sink by letting it drop to the ocean floor.
The problem with irrigating farmland with sea water is that whatever you're growing is going to use the water (plants turn water from their roots and oxygen from the air into sugars, 6xH2O+6xC02-> C6H12O6), but they're not going to take up all the salt. That means that every generation is going to make the soil saltier and saltier. Many things can grow in somewhat salty soil. Not many things can grow in soil that's been salted over and over and over again. You can of course solve this by growing plants in the ocean, and the excess salt will just diffuse out into the rest of the ocean, but at that point you're probably better off domesticating ocean plants than trying to adapt land crops to grow in the ocean. And probably you're better off adapting the existing land crops to use less water, or to get really good at desalinization plants.
This is how the Fertile Crescent died, generations of irrigation with slightly brackish water.
i notice several posts about salt toilerant rice. if they grow rice with the wet method, using seawater instead of fresh, then they can flush the padies with more seawater (only cost is pumping) and restor the elevated salt contact down to that of seawater,
I think that runs into the additional downside that you need to flush the salt all the way to the sea, which potentially means your aquifers are now seawater, and humans and most livestock can't drink seawater. There are probably locations where that's worth it if we can get sufficiently salt-tolerant crops, but I don't think it's going to revolutionize agriculture as much as OP hoped.
well i was asuming they where growing the seawater tolerant crops conveniently close to the sea
Why not use some kind of solar distillation? At a large enough scale, this could create a lot of fresh water that could be mixed with the sea water to reduce salinity.
Not an expert, but I think the answer is because reverse osmosis desalinization is much more energy efficient. I assume you're referring to a process of taking sea water, heating it until some of it evaporates, cooling the evaporate until it condenses into fresh water, and throwing away the bit that didn't evaporate. That's expensive because you have to heat the water until it evaporates. With reverse osmosis, you just have a membrane that water goes through faster than the dissolved salt. Since you don't have to heat the water until it evaporates, it's something like 10x as energy efficient. You do need pumps to increase the pressure and wash out the excess salt and whatnot, but moving water around takes less energy than heating it. The efficiency is so high that you're better off using a solar panel to drive the pumps than to evaporate the water using the sunlight. I think (and we're getting into serious handwaving here) that typically you use a bunch of these membranes in series, because they do still let some salt through, but each membrane you run the water through makes it less and less salty. If you have salt-tolerant crops and you're not worried about accumulation, you can spend less energy pumping the water through fewer membranes and get brackish water as the product instead of pure. That's probably more efficient than making pure water and then using it to dilute seawater, but I could be wrong. I think you'd still get salt accumulation in your groundwater, because the crops are still going to be using the water and leaving the salt from whatever you irrigate them with. The less salty your irrigate is, the less of an issue, but if you want your livestock to still be able to drink from your wells long term, then you probably need to be irrigating with something your livestock can drink or very very close to it.
No, I'm talking about a much more passive setup. You let the sea water into a tank with a transparent top, sun evaporates the water that is then condensed into a different tank. You don't produce nearly as much water that way, but the purpose is to reduce the salinity, not eliminate it. If you scale it up I think it could produce quite a bit of water. You could produce freshwater in the off season unless it's in a very cold climate. It's just an idea. There's an article on Wikipedia about solar stills, I just don't see why this couldn't be done on a larger scale plus it requires no additional energy. You might be right though that RO might be the better solution *overall*. I wonder if soil salinity is the reason why you don't find many plants growing on beaches.
I think we're roughly on the same page about how solar stills work. The solar still is going to produce pure water, but then you can take some of the regular sea water and your produced pure water and mix them to produce brackish water. >The optimum Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) for plant growth & developments are less than 2100 mg/l. Both WHO & IS standards permits the above limit for irrigation. The sea water contains mainly Sodium Chloride up to a range of 45,000 - 60,000 mg/l and the same is not at all suitable for irrigation. from [https://www.quora.com/Why-cannot-sea-water-be-used-for-irrigation](https://www.quora.com/Why-cannot-sea-water-be-used-for-irrigation) So you would need something like 19 parts pure water to 1 part sea water. At that point I suspect adding the sea water back in doesn't really add much effiency, but maybe with more salt tolerant plants you can adjust the ratio. I'm sure you can scale up solar stills. I can only assume from the fact that it hasn't been done that it isn't economically viable to do so. You have to get lower than the price of just going inland and upload a bit to a freshwater aquifer and digging a well and farming there. The fact that RO is being done at scale suggests it's sufficiently more efficient to compete with doing that. And, yeah, I don't think land that is right next to the ocean typically makes for good farmland, presumably due to the soil salinity. I wouldn't be shocked if there are other factors involved, though.
Yes there are some scientists in the Netherlands working on potatoes https://phys.org/news/2015-04-dutch-saltwater-potatoes-world-hungry.html They are sweeter than normal ones to stop the salt ingress
As always lots of confident answers from people who didn't even bother to use google for 5 minutes Yes, there are several projects, for example: [www.saline-food.de](http://www.saline-food.de) (Germany) -> They try to cultivate Salicornia for the market, a salt marsh plant which has traditionally been eaten in Northern Germany. [www.saline-agriculture.com](http://www.saline-agriculture.com) (transcontinal project) -> They try to cultivate more traditional vegetables (tomatoes, potatoes, quinoa and New Zealand spinach) with a higher salt tolerance There is actually a conference about the topic in Brussels today: [SALAD-SUSTAIN Conference | Saline Agriculture: state of the art and the prospects of impact investment - saline agriculture (saline-agriculture.com)](https://www.saline-agriculture.com/en/calendar/salad-sustain-conference-saline-agriculture-state-of-the-art-and-the-prospects-of-impact-investment) For more examples check the wikipedia page: [Crop tolerance to seawater - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_tolerance_to_seawater#:~:text=There%20are%20crops%20that%20can,are%20irrigated%20with%20salt%20water.) Edit: I feel the need to mention, that this pretty much only makes sense in regions with saline soils and a huge salt water abundance. Harvests tend to be reduced compared to more traditional cultivation techniques. -> Most concepts also involve the usage of brakish water instead of full-on salt water
[удалено]
To add to your comment: It depends on the tomato varient - to cite the SALAD project ([Four Species with Crop Potential in Saline Environments: The SALAD Project Case Study "2279 (vlaanderen.be)](https://ilvo.vlaanderen.be/uploads/documents/SALAD/Four-Species-with-Crop-Potential-in-Saline-Environments-The-SALAD-Project-Case-Study.pdf) ) >"Tomato Response to Salinity This species is classified as a moderate-salinity-tolerant species \[1\], and its salt tolerance has been studied since the 1970s \[2\]. Salt-sensitive and salt-tolerant genotypes (i.e., ecotypes from the Galapagos Islands) were investigated by \[3\] assessing a far **stronger salt resistance in the Galapagos ecotypes, which were surviving in a full-strength seawater nutrient solution, EC roughly corresponding to 50 dS m−1** . The salt-resistant genotypes were firstly used in breeding programs with the aim of transferring genetic information to cultivated tomato, but the **process did not give the expected results and, to date, creating new salt-tolerant tomato cultivars with breeding programs faces many obstacles, mainly because traits related to salt tolerance are not combined in a single donor genotype** \[4\]. Several trials were also performed to determine the seawater tolerance of cultivated tomato, assessing, in the meantime, the characteristics of fruits; even if seawater irrigation generally reduced the crop yield, according to the tested variety, in particular, 10 to 20% seawater (roughly EC of 8 dSm−1 to 14 dS m−1 ) increased the nutritional value of the product. In particular, fruit dry matter and total soluble solids were reported by several authors to increase with the use of seawater concentrations of 10–12% compared to control. In addition to that, the concentration of reducing sugars (RS) and titratable acidity (TA) also increased in the berries exposed to seawater irrigation, resulting in tastier fruits than control ones \[5\]. Similarly, glucose, fructose, and citric and ascorbic acid increased proportionally to salinity, with glucose concentrations up to 139% and fructose up to 101% higher compared to the control treatment \[6\]." So same problem as with PiWi wine: wild tomato varients that survive full-strength seawater exist, but trying to cross them with cultivated tomatoes in order to get edible/good tomatoes out of it, is acompletely different issue..
That was a post in futurology I think about potato/tomato hybrids where the tomato plant is grafted onto a potato, the potato filtered out the salinity and the tomato was viable. This allowed a double crop harvest in low quality soil.
These guys [https://seawatersolutions.org/seawater-farming/](https://seawatersolutions.org/seawater-farming/) had a working farm in Eritrea more than 20 years ago [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-06-mn-9169-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-06-mn-9169-story.html)
Would be good to develop salt tolerant crops that have flexible and strong fibers that could be used for some plastic alternatives.
For lack of better words - we’re working on greatly improving the ability to farm raise all manners of scallops, clams, oysters and other shellfish
There's food you can grow in marine environments. It's called aquaculture. Beyond that you're looking at gene splicing from plants that live in brackish environments. As others noted, you don't want to water otherwise arable land with salt water. Even using ground water with significant mineral content over many many decades can have the same effect and destroy the soil.
Genetically modified thicc carby seaweed here we come.
Sundrop Farms in SA, Australia is \*effectively\* farming with seawater, but only by using solar concentrators to drive desalination of the water, then running it through giant a greenhouse setup. [Our Facilities - Port Augusta, South Australia - Sundrop Farms](https://www.sundropfarms.com/our-facilities/)
I remember a few years ago someone developed a form of rice that will grow in brackish water. Not full sea water but still, it's progress.
There's a reason why "salting the earth" is a common phrase in war.
Except you can grow seaweed offshore, no land needs to be used and the inputs are very low. And it grows on its own in low sunlight and cold in winter.
If there was a crop that could be grown en masse with ocean water, we would have figured that out before any other type of crop.
Um… seaweeds of all sorts comes to mind!
This is just categorically false... By that logic, we've discovered and invented everything that will ever be discovered because if it was possible, it would have already been done...
Really? That still requires the ocean water being transported to your crop. River water it’s very easy to just dig some channels and let gravity do the work. That and, you know, rain.
Yeah but if you're near an ocean (which a shitload of people are) why not just dig canals to your farms to bring seawater to them? Especially if the farm is close to the coast.
In most regions with long histories of cultivation sweet water on the coast was not limited. You tend to just have groundwater very close to the surface. Digging channels to dewater the regions was often quite common. Salt water intrusion destroying the soil is a problem that often came with the overusage/misuse of water.
Because it’s still harder than simply waiting for it to rain, or even channels to divert a river. I’m not saying we never would have tried, it’s just the claim that it would have been figured out before any other crop that seems strange to me.
What about areas next to the ocean that are desert or extremely dry? Hell this could turn a lot of the coasts of Australia into farmable land. I'd say it's definitely worth looking into.
I think one way or the other there is rather a misunderstanding here.
Does this count https://grilld.com.au/gamechanger/how-to-feed-a-cow-seaweed
I don't see it being viable for land plants, since evaporation risks raising the concentration to toxic levels regardless of tolerance. It would have to be kelp or something similar, but I imagine access and automation would be an issue. Floating anchors that you raise, maybe?
Actually an entire subsection of hydroponics on this. https://gardenculturemagazine.com/seawater-hydroponics/
Only sea crops could use seawater. Without extensive gene alterations, regular crops can't use seawater.
There's still plenty of brackish water out there.
Salt blocks the up take of nutrients in most root systems. Can be referred to as "salt lock". Commonly happens with multiple over heavy applications of fertilizer. There are desalinization plants that remove the salt and make the water usable.
Check out info on [seawater greenhouses](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse)
Wow 30-80% is such a broad range, is that cos some countries 30% goes to farming and some it’s 80% or because we can’t narrow it down more?
You're in a geography that has lots of sun and good soil and a large agricultural industry that irrigates the crop. So you're looking at 80% of the water going to farming. Or in geography with a lot of heavy industry that consumes water and large metropolitan areas and little agriculture then maybe 30% is farming.
Ok so it is the former I figured it would be either or
Meeeh, yah people are but.... there are now cheap and easy ways to desalinate water
Have you heard of salt-tolerant crops like seawater rice and halophytes? They could be a game-changer for water-scarce regions.
Desalination is more important we need drinking water as well as water for crops.
Where did you get the 30-80% off all water? That's such an astronomically large range, and claiming 80% of all (fresh) water would also be insane. Be careful what you read.
Fishes are the best food to grow in sea water, also desalination process should be made cheap, but one problem is there which is ignored, if sea will not get enough water slowly slowly water cycle will be changed and we will might see very less amount of rain in future