Experimental Crops Thrive On Saltwater

Forget desalination: Farmers should just grow their crops with saltwater.

That possibility may not be farfetched, according to new research. Dutch scientists who pioneered a salt-tolerant potato won a USAid contest in October.

The effort started when a Dutch farmer decided to try to work with saltwater instead of fighting it.

"Dutch farmer Marc Van Rijsselberghe...has used saline water to kill some plants in order to identify which ones are able to thrive," Voice of America reported. "Working with scientists from the Free University of Amsterdam, Van Rijsselberghe and his team divided a farm into eight plots covered with a network of irrigation pipes."

The upshot?

The group has "been able to engineer potatoes that drink diluted seawater without the use of lab-based genetic modification — just plain old farming. Considering that most of the world’s water is salinated, using saltwater to grow our food may help solve world hunger," Ask Men reported.

Desalination is far too expensive for many countries to embrace the technology.

"But thanks to a partnership with Dutch development consultants MetaMeta, several tons of the Texel seed potatoes are now on their way to Pakistan where thousands of hectares of what until now had been unproductive land because of sea water encroachment have been set aside for them," The Guardian reported.

Is there a threat of overdosing on salt when eating produce grown in saltwater?

“What we find is that, if you tease a plant with salt, it compensates with more sugar,” one researcher told The Guardian. “The strawberries we grow, for example, are very sweet. 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, you wouldn’t eat them by the bucketful."