Most farms are located in rural areas and are irrigated by freshwater. Now, a startup in Scotland is farming near the coast and using seawater to grow crops. Using the water of the ocean for irrigation can be a game changer for a hungry world.
Food production needs to increase by 70 percent in the next 30 years to keep up with population increases. Freshwater only makes up two percent of all the water of the planet, and it is growing scarcer in many places like Scotland due to climate change.
Now, Seawater Solutions, a Glasgow-based non-governmental organization founded in 2017, is using saltwater instead of freshwater to grow crops. Co-founder and CEO Yanik Nyberg lived and worked in areas of Africa and Asia that have been negatively impacted by water scarcity and global warming. Seawater Solutions was created to address the issues of coastal communities that face the urgent concern of land salinization (盐渍化), according to the organization’s website.
In an interview, Nyberg told The Nation that he came up with the idea of redeveloping degraded farmland and turning it into artificial wetland ecosystems that use seawater and grow plants that can tolerate the salt, “It’s a relatively simple concept,” he said. “Seawater is introduced to coastal farmland, where naturally salt-tolerant crops are grown. These crops store massive amounts of carbon and are extremely nutritious, being called ‘superfoods’ across the world.”
The new farmland consists of artificial saltwater marshes (沼泽) that have seawater pumped over them. Then the ecosystem will be used for saline plants, which can be used for food, biofuels, sea-plant animal foods, and as raw materials for cosmetics.
Downhill Farm in Ayrshire, Scotland uses water from the Atlantic Ocean to grow crops. Seawater Solutions also has projects in Ghana, Malawi, Namibia and Spain, with more in the planning stage. While growing crops in seawater is a hard sell, it is an environmentally sound way to meet the food demands of a growing world population.
【小题1】What’s the function of paragraph 2?| A．Pointing out serious food problems in Scotland. |
| B．Warning farmers of the decrease of the farmland. |
| C．Analyzing the consequences of population increases. |
| D．Showing the necessity of growing crops with seawater. |
| A．To serve the local government. | B．To deal with land salinization. |
| C．To remove coastal communities. | D．To purify seawater in some areas. |
| A．They have a wide range of uses. | B．They are nutritious but expensive. |
| C．They prove unpopular in the world. | D．They are salt-free and healthy foods. |
| A．It deserves certain recognition. | B．It disturbs the wetland ecosystem. |
| C．It is inapplicable to other places. | D．It is easily acceptable and adoptable. |
