
Rice grown using seawater in Dubai’s deserts - signa11
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2148684/coming-plate-near-you-soon-rice-grown-chinese-scientists-using
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theptip
> After four decades of cross-breeding and genetic screening, researchers had
> developed eight separate species but their yields remained too low to make
> widespread cultivation worthwhile. But last year the team made a
> breakthrough by doubling the yield to more than 4.5 tonnes per hectare.

Wonder if this was a CRISPR project; seems like an exciting development if so,
as perhaps the "brackish water resistant" gene could be inserted into other
plants as well.

~~~
ttsda
That quote seems to imply they only tested the cross-bred varieties. No
CRISPR.

That said, whoever wrote this article doesn't seem to know the difference
between a species and a variety, so i'll take it with a grain of salt ;)

~~~
theptip
To me, the "... last year the team made a breakthrough by doubling the yield
to more than 4.5 tonnes per hectare." part sounds like they changed tack from
what they had been trying for the previous 4 decades.

Could be a coincidence though.

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petecox
Areas of Australia are affected by high salt levels in the soil [0].

Growing the strains of rice near the shores of saline lakes could perhaps be
part of rehabilitation, in which rice crops reduce the saltiness of the land
over time.

[0] [http://agriculture.vic.gov.au/agriculture/farm-
management/so...](http://agriculture.vic.gov.au/agriculture/farm-
management/soil-and-water/salinity/salinity-explained)

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nitrogen
Are there any long-term consequences to dumping salt onto the sand? Does it
accumulate, or do the deserts shift enough in the wind that it's not a
problem?

~~~
mabbo
Are they really just dumping it? Rice paddies are usually submerged entirely.
If sea water is acceptable to these plants, one could conceivably just have a
canal from the ocean feeding water in (and out), with some minor dams to
handle tides. Less energy used than pumping and deals with the problem of
salts left behind from evaporation.

~~~
joelthelion
Won't water evaporate and salt deposit, like in a salt pond?

~~~
mc32
Tidal mudflats don't seem to accumulate salt in the same way evaporative salt
ponds do, since the water is not trapped allowing for concentration. So maybe
something where tidal water is allowed to flush out overly saline water would
work?

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ris
But wouldn't that also flush out all the nutrients and nitrogen the rice needs
to grow too?

~~~
krageon
I think on hot days you are supposed to "flush" the rice fields with fresh
(cooler) water anyway. The runoff then goes back to wherever (a river or in
this case maybe the ocean). Assuming that is true, I imagine that means any
relevant nutrients are not flushed out by this process.

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rmason
A wise old farmer told me once they're not manufacturing any more farm land. I
always believed he was correct, but turns out thanks to science it's no longer
true.

It looks to me, thanks to Chinese scientists, the world suddenly has a whole
lot more farm land!

~~~
fulafel
Sadly deforestation to make more farmland is still going strong, especially in
tropical rainforests.

A simple thing that everyone can do to help is reducing/stopping meat and
dairy consumption, because the additional farmland is used to produce
livestock feed.

~~~
candiodari
A mere 100 years ago pretty much everything that was for sale, food, clothes,
tennis rackets, condoms (or what passed for one), ... was produced from
animals.

You'd have to stop doing a hell of a lot more than merely stop eating meat to
have any measurable impact.

Also what about the secondary effect ? If you stop eating meat, that will
increase supply and reduce demand, and thus drop the price by a lot, which
will lead to new customers, both for eating and other applications.

You really want to help ? Buy the rainforest, let it be rainforest. For bonus
points, destroy the co2 certificates instead of selling them.

Things just aren't this simple.

~~~
restalis
Another free market solution (well, kind of), is for the price of CO₂ to rise
enough so it may be economically feasible to "buy the rainforest [to] let it
be rainforest". This also should of course come with some mean of allotting
taxed resources to the CO₂ consumers.

~~~
candiodari
That one requires global governance which doesn't exist (and frankly seems
VERY undesirable).

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mythrwy
The seawater is diluted with fresh water (it doesn't give ratio).

Assuming they can get enough fresh water for the dilution, this might work for
a limited number of cycles, but what I bet happens in Dubai is that after a
period of time that salt builds up in the soil to the point they are unusable
even irrigating with fresh water. Unless they can somehow leach the salt well
below the root zone which may be possible. After all it is an arid desert and
applying a shallow amount of brackish water to a large surface area will
result in a lot of evaporation increasing salt content.

~~~
contingencies
_Assuming they can get enough fresh water for the dilution_

New filtration technologies are emerging that make this far cheaper.

~~~
teekert
As far as we know from this article the ratio may be fresh:seawater, 99:1, I
hate this kind of article, you keep hunting for that one piece of info that
allows you to estimate the value of the discovery, and it never comes.

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nashashmi
With the amount of sun that place gets, they should be focusing on
evapotranspiration instead of using seawater on good Sandy soil.

Places near the Dead Sea will probably be a better fit for this kind of rice.

~~~
the8472
C4-cycle rice, which should need less water and thus eavporate less, is also
an area of research.

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CommanderData
Using direct sea-water or was it was filtered or diluted?

What about the many chemical pollutants and toxins present in sea water. Does
this method of agriculture have any affect on produce and land?

~~~
cfadvan
Diluted at least 50-50, but I don’t know the answer to your second and third
questions, sorry.

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samatman
Remember Carthago delenda est?

Well. This is how they did it.

~~~
credit_guy
Maybe you are being sarcastic. In any case, the legend that the Romans have
spread salt over the ground of the razed city of Carthage has no basis [1].

"Starting in the 19th century, various texts claim that the Roman general
Scipio Aemilianus Africanus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with
salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BC), sacking it, and
enslaving the survivors. Though ancient sources do mention symbolically
drawing a plow over various cities, and salting them, none mention Carthage in
particular. The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modeled on the
story of Shechem."

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth#Destroying_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth#Destroying_cities)

~~~
curiousgal
I live in Carthage and though it's not an agricultural hub by any means,
things do grow here.

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matte_black
Wow, if we can grow more foods from sea water we could avert world hunger
issues as fresh water becomes more scarce and requires more energy to extract.

~~~
curiousgal
Sea weed already grows in Sea water, it's a logistics/marketing problem.

~~~
lxmorj
Seaweed is calorically weak.

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restalis
This reminds me of Incorporated (TV series), with a similar idea of using the
deserts for seawater adapted crops. This is so fascinating to see being
developed in real life and even more so to be marveled at in an exercise of
forecasting the changes it ought to bring into the world. Just to pick a few
such changes, this how the deserts will suddenly start worth something (and
offer new reasons to be fought over, unfortunately). This is also how dramatic
demographic booms took place over the history, so expect UAE to growth several
times its current number of inhabitants; or next to it, in Saudi Arabia,
expect a growth to something on the order of hundreds of millions!

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ris
As amazing as this sounds you've got to wonder what this rice would do to
peoples' blood pressure.

~~~
sjwright
Salt levels in food are largely guided by palate. If the amount of salt
embedded in the harvested rice is significant relative to the overall sodium
load of a typical meal, then its use will be limited to dishes that already
contain added salt. In which case salt embedded in the rice will be largely
offset by reduced amounts of added salt, keeping the overall dish in balance.

Also it should be noted that the link between high salt intake and negative
cardiovascular health outcomes is disputed and is likely less significant than
the current mainstream medical advice claims. (Like everything related to
dietary science, the evidence on both sides of any argument is poor at best.
So take it with a grain of salt. Ha.)

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aussieguy1234
They need to dilute the seawater with freshwater

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nopinsight
My take: Resources, though limited, are not fixed. Their availability also
depends on science and technology available.

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nashashmi
Were the rice invented using genomics or genetics?

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wedn3sday
Doesn't look like it, just old fashioned selective breeding.

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collyw
Selective breeding is genetics, just the old school way of doing it.

~~~
nashashmi
Selective breeding is genomics. Genetics is when specific genes are
artificially inserted

~~~
collyw
Neither of these statements is true.

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alexanderdmitri
The network activity on this page is ridiculous.

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yosito
IIRC there's some kind of Evangelical prophecy about the ability to grow food
in the desert being a sign of the apocalypse. This should go well with Trump's
stance on Israel and unpredictability regarding nuclear strategy. ಠ_ಠ

~~~
orf
People have been growing food in California for a long, long time though.

~~~
kakwa_
Not only California.

The same could be said for Saudi Arabia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation_in_Saudi_Arabia#/me...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation_in_Saudi_Arabia#/media/File:Saudi_Arabia_irrigation.jpg)

(and also in Libya IIRC)

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maxnoe
So so I still need to add salt to the cooking water?

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newnewpdro
Talk about trading your future for a relatively brief, near-term gain. This is
just going to salt the land cumulatively until nothing will grow there, ever.

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akvadrako
In the desert? :)

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newnewpdro
Yes, using saltwater is making a bad situation worse.

Much of the desert you just need to add fresh water and you can grow things.
If you salt the land in the process, that's not going to be the case for long,
even with brackish-tolerant species.

"Despite its aridity, the Mojave (and particularly the Antelope Valley in its
southwest) has long been a center of alfalfa production; fed by irrigation
coming from groundwater and (in the 20th century) from the California
Aqueduct." [1]

We grow things in the desert, much of California would be dry desert land if
not for simple irrigation - California grows a massive proportion of our food.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert#Climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert#Climate)

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akvadrako
But where would Dubai ever get fresh water from naturally?

It’s not a bad situation worse; it’s a hopeless situation better.

~~~
newnewpdro
Only if your position is that desalination of their abundant saltwater is
hopeless.

Why you would take that position escapes me.

