https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/2dcb14...94d21ca8e/ss_first-farm-to-grow-veg-in-a.html grow veg in a desert using only sun and seawater Sunshine and seawater. That’s all a new, futuristic-looking greenhouse needs to produce 17,000 tonnes of tomatoes per year in the South Australian desert. It’s the first agricultural system of its kind in the world and uses no soil, pesticides, fossil fuels or groundwater. As the demand for fresh water and energy continues to rise, this might be the face of farming in the future. An international team of scientists have spent the last six years fine-tuning the design – first with a pilot greenhouse built in 2010; then with a commercial-scale facility that began construction in 2014 and was officially launched today. How it works Seawater is piped 2 kilometres from the Spencer Gulf to Sundrop
Interesting. One can only wonder why. We have or had a tree planting racket in this country where vast parcels of perfect river side land was bought up and they put in trees. They are crap trees probably only good for paper. Would not be profitable except for subsidies but the racket has taken good land suitable for food production out of the picture. You can't even run cattle. I think the US Army has been growing food using hydroponics for years, at least they could and did the last time I looked. Alex
Nice stuff. But with your title: Science isn't about one thing being greater then another. Science is many disciplines doing and achieving different things, and sometimes achieving ground breaking results for other disciplines. eg: The beginning of the space race was man made Satellites...Think how this humble begining of the space age has helped so many other disciplines....meteorology, Agriculture, Navigation just three off the top of my head. Going to Mars is great my friend, just as great as achieving agriculture efforts in areas that once were desert.
That is a long way from market. You can grow tomatoes in a foam box here on your patio if you are keen. Alex
I wonder about ROI. Anything can be done experimentally, but is it practical? With no soil, where do the nutrients come from?
Great; let's do that. No reason to choose between that and going to Mars (or making movies, or funding cancer research, or growing conventional crops.)
Check out hydroponic horticulture. They grow tomatoes and other stuff that way. I saw s hydro farm growing spinach in blue metal..granite stones. Sewer pipes full of it holes for the spinach and big tank of nutriment enriched water and the biggest spinach I ever saw. The guy was trying to sell it to me so I took away an idea of how easy it is...the best thing is you harvest st waist height no bending and no weeds. Alex
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Hmmm, You also appear delusional among your other grand qualities. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Off topic but friends live in a plantation forest. The company went bust so land was resold and all the trees poisoned. What a great waste of time and effort and tax subsidies. Alex
I guess that's great for growing tomatoes, but nowhere near the benefits and nowhere near the feasibility of mass producing hemp. Also, permaculture is a much more viable solution than the ongoing and increasing damaging effects of agriculture. Not only can permaculture be implemented in desert regions it can reverse the existing damage of agriculture. Greening the Desert
We do that here. We desalinate water (and we generate more than enough solar to power the desalinator) and then grow crops in places as inhospitable as the Yuma desert.
