If we grow some crop with salt water, we will be literally salting the earth, so unless we are talking about hydroponics/aquaponics, that would be very damaging for the soil and environment. That needs to be consider as well.
It’s a good point, but desalination has the same issue. Whenever you use seawater to produce something with almost no salt in it (be it desalinated water or crops), that means the salt has to go somewhere else. Probably in concentrated form.
Desalination may not salt the earth, but brine can create dead zones in the water. There are solutions like diluting it, and there are cases of operators who don’t care. Either way, salt is an issue if you use salt water. Has to go somewhere.
If you’re growing salt-tolerant crops and only ever intend to use that land as farmland, that could arguably be a benefit, don’t have to use as many chemicals to control weeds and pests if the weeds and pests can’t tolerate the salt
Probably need to make sure that the salt is being contained to the farm area, and I’d imagine you would need to periodically flush it with fresh water or something if too much salt begins to accumulate in the soil for even your salt tolerant crops.
Probably need to make sure that the salt is being contained to the farm area, and I’d imagine you would need to periodically flush it with fresh water or something if too much salt begins to accumulate in the soil for even your salt tolerant crops.
That seems hard to manage. And there is also the risk of that salt to reach underground water. I would say that it’s feasible to do it right, but at a high cost.
There are some plants that already grow in seawater, perhaps one way to achieve that effect might be to go about it the other way round, and try to breed or engineer one of these plants into something that can be used as a staple crop? Some quick wiki searching suggests to me that a few species of such plants are edible, though most I could find are so as vegetable type plants and not used like corn or potatoes or such. I did find reference to a salt tolerant plant that can be grown for cooking oil though.
And start farming the seabed to devastate even more ecosystems? I don’t think so. The best solution is actually to have less people. Better use the CRISPR to create some fun viruses.
I wasn’t referring to seaweed on the seabed, I was referring to land plants that grow in seawater. I figure that these kind of plants could be relevant in places like coastal deserts, since seawater is more available than fresh in such places, or in areas that have suffered from severe saltwater intrusion or which become partially flooded by seawater due to sea level rise.