Salt water is bad news for most crops, but not for a series of tomatoes, alfalfa, onions and rice germinating in a laboratory in Israel.
These crops are the brainchild of the non-GMO brainchild of Ṛcā Godbole, plant molecular biologist and co-founder of SaliCrop. And they don’t just grow, they thrive in salt water.
For the past four years, SaliCrop has tested its seed improvement technology on tomatoes in southern Spain, where a devastating drought has triggered severe salinization, a process by which soils become too salty for crops can grow efficiently.
SaliCrop has been testing its seed improvement technology on tomato farms in southern Spain for four years. Guy Shery
However, with SaliCrop seeds, participating tomato growers saw a 10 to 17 percent increase in their crop yields, earning them an additional $1,600 per hectare, Carmit Oron, CEO of SaliCrop, told Business Insider.
Spain is just one of many places around the world facing a serious salinization problem. A multi-year perfect storm of irrigation, warming global temperatures and rising sea levels have made 20 to 50 percent of the world’s irrigated soils too salty to be fertile. This costs the global economy an estimated $27 billion per year in lost crops.
Meanwhile, the number of mouths to feed continues to grow, with the global human population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, according to UN estimates. “How can we grow more on land that is degrading? That was the main question and motivation for creating SaliCrop,” Oron said.
Godbole founded SaliCrop with Sharon Devir, an agricultural engineer, with a big mission: to help farmers who face the challenges of our rapidly changing world and prevent starvation for potentially billions of people.
“We believe this solution is indispensable,” Devir told BI.
The success of SaliCrop in salt water
SaliCrop scientists are developing an army of resilient crops that can grow under the stresses of our changing world, like saltier soils and warmer temperatures.
Salt occurs naturally in soils everywhere, but too much can make it harder for plants to absorb water and nutrients, stunting their growth, reducing crop yields, and ultimately threatening global food production.
Rice plants planted in salty soil. Nuttaya99/Getty Images
Around the world, more than 1.5 billion people live with soils that have become too salty for effective cultivation. And it is predicted to only get worse.
In India, for example, 44% of land is already saline, and researchers estimate that salinization will affect 50% of the country by 2050.
The problem that farmers around the world cannot escape is warmer average temperatures, which accelerate soil evaporation, concentrating salt in that soil, especially in arid regions.
Flooding from sea level rise also poses a threat, particularly to coastal agricultural lands, as it deposits more salt into the soil and groundwater. Poor irrigation practices, such as insufficient water application, use of salt water, and lack of proper drainage, can also lead to salty soils.
Irrigation can lead to salinization, especially if farmers water their crops with salt water. Karl Weatherly/Getty Images
To help farmers combat all of these factors, SaliCrop is working to bring its solution to eight different countries and is already fielding calls from seed companies in Europe, India and Africa who are looking for immediate solutions to improve their crop yield, Oron said.
“Plants have certain environmental stress-inducible genes that act as internal alarms,” Godbole explained in a press release. “When there’s too much salt or too much heat, these alarms go off and the plant goes into defense mode.”
Godbole found a way to harness these warning bells by exposing plants to stress early in their growth cycle. In this case, that means watering the crops with salt water in their lab. This way, when planted in salty soil, the crops already have their defenses strengthened, making them less sensitive to salty conditions.
Based on their test data, this strategy cuts crop losses due to stress in half, and it only takes about a year to achieve this result, Devir said.
“We tailor our technology to each crop, each species and even each batch of species,” Devir said. This allows them to precisely target the best resilience response and maximize yield for each crop type.
Sowing the future with non-GMO crops
“We think it will be one to two years before our solution has a global footprint,” Devir said. So far, SaliCrop has worked with farms from 25 to 250 acres. Globally, more than 3,700 acres – just over four times the size of New York’s Central Park – of agricultural land grow SaliCrop seeds.
Harvesting an alfalfa crop in a Kansas field. Andy Sacks/Getty Images
But SaliCrop isn’t the only company targeting a non-GMO solution. Red Sea Farms, for example, is a Saudi company that uses selective breeding to grow crops that can be irrigated with salt water. In Sweden, a company called OlsAro is growing salt-tolerant wheat using AI to breed for traits that improve its resilience.
Worldwide, up to 783 million people suffer from chronic hunger. The UN has set itself an ambitious goal: to end hunger by 2030, but it will need innovative solutions to improve agricultural productivity in the face of climate change.
Resilient non-GMO crops are one possible answer. “SaliCrop is a good example of how you can bring a cheap, reliable solution to the world, without negative effects on the environment, simply to produce more food,” Devir said. “We believe in it.”
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