Brown J. Jed, Glenn Edward P., and O’Leary James W. 1998. Irrigating Crops with Seawater. Scientific American.
Irrigating Crops with Seawater'; talks about the global problem of finding enough water and land for the world’s population to survive. An estimated 494.2 million acres of cropland is needed just to feed the tropics and subtropics for the next 30 years. However, only close to 200 million acres are available. Therefore, new sources of water and land are needed to grow crops. The writers of this article have been testing the prospect of using seawater in agriculture. This seawater agriculture is when salt-tolerant crops are grown using ocean water for irrigation. Desert areas take up 43% of the surface of the earth and this new agriculture technique can be done in deserts. Hugo Boyko and Elisabeth Boyko first used seawater agriculture after World War II. Many different crops have been tested such as barley and the date palm. The writers of this article however have been testing halophytes, which, is a salt-tolerant plant that can be used for food, forage and oilseed crops. They first gathered several hundred halophytes and began testing these plants in the desert of Puerto Peñasco. They irrigated the plants daily by flooding the fields with seawater from the Gulf of California. The best halophytes produced roughly the yield of alfalfa using freshwater irrigation. In order to show that these halophytes could replace other crops for use they tested to see if the crops could feed livestock. The halophytes have protein and carbohydrates but they contain too much salt. This limits the amount an animal can eat and dilutes the nutritional value. Therefore, the authors decided to use the halophytes as part of a mixed diet for the livestock. The animals’ meat taste was not affected, but the animals eating the halophyte-mixed diet drank more water and produced 10 percent less meat.
This new agriculture method has many advantages too. First, it is cheaper to pump the seawater than to pump freshwater. In addition, seawater irrigation does not require any special equipment. The same fields have been irrigated for 10 years with no water buildup or salts in the root zone. Finally, installing the seawater irrigation will not disrupt the ecosystems as much because they are installed on barren or almost barren areas. There are also some disadvantages to irrigating crops with seawater. First, a large quantity of high-salt drainage water that will contain unused fertilizer will be discharged back into the sea.
Irrigation aids the leaching of chemicals used in the production of grapes into the environment. The shift towards drip irrigation has been positive for the environment. It has minimized the quantity of water used in irrigation thus minimizing chemical leaching.
While growing up we learn that the best way to stay healthy and look great is through proper dieting and regular exercise. As we get older and feel the pressure of obtaining perfect looks, the sensationalism of fad dieting can seem like a dream come true. With the desire of a tiny waist plaguing America, it can be difficult to decide between healthy dieting an exercise, or extreme fad diets promising fast results. When choosing which method will work best for you can be stressful, it is important to think about what is really best for your body. Each form of dieting has different long term results, can affect your overall health, and can have an effect on the rest of your appearance.
Sheaffer, John R., and Leonard A. Stevens. Future Water. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1983.
The school's food isn’t filling and a great deal of the students think it’s disgusting. A majority of the schools give students a little scoop of the main choice and a little scoop of the side servings. Each student pays roughly $2.60 for one full serving (School Meal Trends & Stats). From talking with other students, they pay anywhere between a $1.25 and $1.50 for each extra serving. Basically, a student needs to spend about $5 on lunch, which is three servings, in order to be satisfied for the rest of the day. Paying $5 for three servings isn’t even the worst part. Most of the food being served, students don’t even enjoy eating. It’s either not cooked fully or they just don’t like it. Instead of forcing students to pay $5 for lunch they don’t even like, let them go spend it at a fast food place in town.
Such efficiency will allow for a mass amount of crop production through less water use and provide Mother Nature with enough time to restore what is used in a natural manner, thus disproving Hardin’s fear of running out of the most essential natural resource, water (Gul).
Students can have a choice of meals. Students loves to eat fast food because the students loves to eat all kind of fast food like Panda Express or Subway. and the students loves to eat fast food and not school lunch. Students should go the mall and have their own food and not have to pick what they have on the counter. Students should go off campus to get their favorite food from their favorite food restaurant and go eat their with there friends and tell them all about it how this food is so
Aquaponics produces the biggest, best, and most diverse fruits and vegetables in the smallest amount of space. Unlike normal gardening and farming, Aquaponics is not limited to seasons or climate, which means all types of fruits and vegetables can be produced year round. When farmers can produce any plant, any where, at any time, the produce can be picked at the peak of its ripeness, which is when it looks and tastes the best, and since farme...
In the first study examined, “Effect of Different Salinities on the Survival and Growth of Artemina Spp,” researchers Soundaraparian and Saravanakumar designed an experiment to ascertain the ideal conditions for the growth of brine shrimp, or Artemina. In the Introduction, the scientists note the growing significance of Artemina, as it is now used as live feed for over 85 percent of cultured species around the world. Thus, a demand to grow huge quantities of Artemia has arisen, making this study incredibly relevant.
McKeel Academy has close-to-recently enforced a new ‘no outside food’ policy in which students are not permitted to buy food (e.g. Wendy’s, McDonalds, etc…) and consume on school campus. This policy was put into action so that McKeel could promote the sales of their new food program. The problem with this is that administration has forgotten that McKeel is a school, not a business.While the quality of food at McKeel has certainly enhanced, that doesn’t give them an excuse to revoke the right of the students to nourish themselves how they please. If students were once again able to purchase their own food, there would be plenty of benefits. One benefit would be
Above, is a quote from a man recovered from an article of writing back in the ancient Egyptian times. Irrigation is a form of re-routing water, to parts of land that the water is needed, in farming terms. For Example, there are two crops, one crop is getting all the water, and it’s flooding. With irrigation, the farmer will re-route the water towards the other crop, as well as sharing the water with the crop that was being flooded. So now, both crops are getting enough water and they are not flooding nor suffering from drought.
The average human can not live any longer than three days without water. Many of the world’s fresh water sources are running dry or are being contaminated, particularly in developing nations, leaving many without safe water to drink. Only two and a half percent of the Earth’s water is freshwater, and less than one percent is accessible by humans (not tied up in ice caps). This one percent of the Earth’s water supply is expected to sustain a population of over 7 billion people, each needing 2.6 liters a day to remain fully healthy, plus all of the water required for agriculture and industry. These scenarios will only become more and more prevalent as time moves on and we consume more water. The United Nations has classified our planet as being in the midst of a global “water crisis.” Global water supply and shortages are becoming an incredibly real and serious issue, and planning for the future is key to preventing population decline due to a lack of safe drinking water. Shortages of drinking water lead to wars and serious international conflict for basic human survival needs. One of the most popularly and commonly proposed solutions to this problem is to create seawater desalination plants to remove salt from ocean water to make it safe to drink. These water desalination plants, however, are not a viable option to carry us in to the future due to their potentially harmful impacts and expenses.
- Soil and Water Quality: An Agenda For Agriculture, Committee on Long-Range Soil and Water Conservation, Board on Agriculture., National Research Council: Washington D.C., National Academy Press, 1993. p. 218.
Smith, Zachary A., and Grenetta Thomassey. Freshwater Issues: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Print
Sandra Postel, on the other hand, has a different opinion than Danielle’s. She proposed that “without increasing water productivity in irrigation, major food-producing regions will not have enough water to sustain crop production”.
Rogers, Peter. 2008. "Facing the Freshwater CRISIS. (Cover story)." Scientific American 299, no. 2: 46-53. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed November 4, 2010).