Growing Crops in the Desert with Seawater | Freethink

you'll read no end of the stories about the water wars and have a well running out of water were all doomed drought left right and center half the planets on fire but actually we're not sure it's just that most of it is too salty and it's in the wrong place for the last 50 200 years we've been using irrigation to increase the amount of food that's available you might get you out for a problem for a year or ten but it doesn't solve the problem of needing wall water to grow more food for this growing population the real problem that the seawater greenhouse is designed to address is enabling the world to grow more food unlike a conventional greenhouse which you might think of as a hot house the seawater greenhouse is the opposite is a cool house designed to cool humidify and create a climate suited to temperate type crops in hot arid regions Africa is the world center for water insecurity which in turn makes it the world's center for food insecurity and there's absolutely no need for at all [Music] [Music] this is a piece of evaporator this is the main component of the co2 greenhouse the winning flows through the evaporators humidity goes up when the temperature goes down you can reduce the amount of water that crop needs maybe tenfold maybe even a hundredfold depending on what the conditions are like outside you will hear people say that you can't use these salination to grow crops because water has a higher value than the crop but it depends how much water you need if we're reducing the amount water it needs then that the cost of that water becomes a fairly trivial insignificant component Somaliland it has a population of 4 million you would need something like 10 square miles of this kind of obstruction to feed the country the cost of that would be of the order of 400 million dollars which sounds like a lot of money but actually there's only 1 percent of the annual aid budget that goes to sub-saharan Africa we're demonstrating that it is economically viable practical and not very difficult to use sea water to grow Russia's temperate crops it is exciting to be able to work on solutions to those kind of problems [Music] you

Channel: Freethink

Views: 715,671

Keywords: seawater greenhouse, farming with seawater, farming with salty water, freethink, free think, free think documentary, desert farming, climate change, latest news, seawater greenhouse somaliland, seawater greenhouse how it works, seawater greenhouse project, global food crisis, solving the global food crisis, water insecurity, global food security, global food insecurity, growing, desert projects, sahara forest project, desert agriculture, turning desert into forest

Id: PvV-iPdORLc

Length: 3min 0sec (180 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Rowanana]

I'm no expert but I'm pretty skeptical about their claims of how much it'll reduce their water needs and the yields they expect...

That said, the corrugated cardboard as a low cost seawater swamp cooler is freaking brilliant. Someone should be damned proud of that one.

[u/Smokeyburnout1]

What happens when the cardboard walls get saturated with salt deposits and then need to be replaced with new cardboard?

[u/PirateMud]

I thought this was a Tom Scott video from the thumbnail...

[u/AgAero]

So do they reclaim any of the freshwater from the air? They're dropping the vapor pressure of water in the environment to slow down transpiration in the plants, but where do they get the water for irrigation? Is it from somewhere within the system, or is it drawn from more traditional sources?

[u/cocaine-cupcakes]

So most desalination plants utilize RO filtration meaning theres a heavy brine stream relative to the potable water output. Can you use the brine as the cooling water source?

[u/[deleted]]

It’s what plants crave.

[u/[deleted]]

Why is he in a video inside of a video?

[u/NuclearKoala]

SOLAARRRR ROADS!!!

In all seriousness, interesting. Good premise. Wonder if a positive study will come out from this.