A small field on an island off the Netherlands’ northern coast promises one answer to the problem of how to feed the world’s ever-growing population: potatoes and other crops that grow in saltwater.
Every day, swathes of farmland somewhere in the world become unusable because of salty soil, but farmers here on windswept Texel are finding solutions using traditional methods.
The team headed by farmer Mark van Rijsselberghe has planted about 30 types of potato and their approach is simple: Anything that dies in the saline environment is abandoned, and anything that lives “we try to follow up on,” Van Rijsselberghe said. “It’s faster.”
Photo: AFP
The experiments do not just target potatoes, but also look at how other crops grow in saltwater, including carrots, strawberries and lettuce. The plants are irrigated using pumps that manage water down to the drop, so the plant and soil salinity can be accurately measured and the effect of “sweet” rain water taken into account.
Van Rijsselberghe, 60, started the Salty Potato Farm about 10 years ago in the hope of helping the world’s malnourished.
The team, supported by Amsterdam University, uses neither genetically modified organisms nor laboratories in their quest for food that grows in salty environments.
With more than 5,000 varieties, the potato is the world’s fourth-most popular food crop, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).
Plants whose ancestors grew near or on the sea, but have moved inland with human populations, are likely still to have the necessary genes.
“It could be a hundred, it could be a thousand years ago, they still are capable of coping with saline surroundings,” Van Rijsselberghe said.
While today much research is focused on improving the yield of crops, the Dutch team has taken the opposite approach: trying to grow crops on land previously considered unusable.
The bespectacled farmer jokes that in a country where much of the land lies below sea level, “we are so afraid of the sea that until 10 years ago we didn’t dare to do anything with sea water and growing plants.”
The world loses about 2,000 hectares of agricultural land a day to salt-induced degradation in 75 countries, caused by bad or absent irrigation, according to the UN Institute for Water, Environment and Health.
The problem today affects an area the size of France — about 62 million hectares or 20 percent of the world’s irrigated lands, up from 45 million hectares in the early 1990s.
Solutions to make the land cultivable once more are too expensive for most of the areas, including the basin of the Yellow River in China, the Euphrates in Syria and Iraq and the Indus Valley in Pakistan.
The team on Texel has already sent thousands of its potatoes to Pakistan, where they were successful, said Van Rijsselberghe, who will send more plants next year.
These “salt” potatoes could transform the lives of thousands of farmers in affected regions and, in the long term, those of about 250 million people who live on salt-afflicted soil.
The potato was introduced to Europe from Peru in the 16th century and became popular because of its ability to feed people during the continent’s frequent famines.
However, over-reliance on the crop was potentially disastrous, with a blight leading to the devastating 19th-century Irish potato famine.
Today, about 800 million people in the world are undernourished, according to the FAO, with salt degradation threatening 10 percent of the global cereal crop.
The potatoes grown here taste sweeter than those grown on normal land, because the plant produces more sugars to compensate for the salty environment.
The salt absorbed by the plant stays in the leaves, not in the flesh.
However, the price of the potatoes is for now prohibitive, with 1 kilo selling for 5 euros (US$5.60), compared with less than 1 euro for regular potatoes.
“We grow around 30,000 kilos per hectare, a farmer with good conditions around 60,000 kilos,” said Robin Konijn, the farm’s financial director.
Countries ranging from Egypt to Bangladesh and India have already asked for advice on planting their own salt-proof crops.
The team is also soon to start trying to cultivate potatoes in the salty wetlands of the Camargue in the south of France — the so-called “Miss Mignon” (French for “Miss Cutie Pie”).
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by