Sea Greens: Examining the Potential of Saline Agriculture

Multimedia journalist Rachel Parsons examines the relationship between climate change impacts, freshwater scarcity, and food systems by focusing on an alternative to traditional farming: saline agriculture.

People have harvested plants from high-salt environments for food and fuel for millennia. Despite this history, however, saline agriculture is only now moving into mainstream practice after decades of academic research.

In southwest Bangladesh, where seawater infiltrates the land of smallholder farmers, thousands have been trained to grow salt-tolerant varieties of traditional crops. The stories from this estuarine region highlight the country’s proactive policy on saline agriculture and whether the nonprofit sector has facilitated successful solutions.

In Spain and Ghana, degraded coastal regions are perfect for domestication and cultivation of wild plants that grow naturally in high-salt soils, known as halophytes. Stories from case studies in these countries present the problems and results of years of halophyte research and how the missing link—the commercial sector—is emerging to bring halophytic products from the scientific realm to grocery stores, restaurants, biomass refiners, and more.