Overcoming salinity in our soil
In the past decades, a combination of unsustainable and bad farming practices have led to increased salinity in Egyptian soils.
The situation started to worsen since the Nile flood stopped and instead regular mechanical irrigation takes place.
Through regular irrigation the whole year through, evaporation increased and pulled salts from deeper soil sediments up to the root zone of the plants. This in turn pulls water from the plants roots and weakens them.
Salinity in clay soil is also an urgent matter, because salt causes clay particles to clump. This results in big pieces of cement-like soil that cracks easily. When irrigated, salty clay soil become compact, has bad aeration and negatively affects root health.
There is a known method to many farmers to rid salt from soil. Unfortunately it is highly wasteful as it requires flushing soil with large amounts of water while adding lime (Gyps zera3y), sulfur or calcium. While it can lead to results, it is not a solution. It rids you of your fertile soil and there is just not enough water for everyone to do this! We must find solutions in our own hands. Some shortcuts to take until we rebuild our soil health.
The first one and most obvious is to reduce the amount of water used in irrigation. This is easily achieved by making raised beds.
Raised beds distribute water in your field, and reduce your needs by one third! This also saves you time and diesel money for pumping!
More incredible, is that by making raised beds, you protect your plant roots from the accumulation of salt. Because raised beds are at least 20 centimeters high, the salts end up in the furrows, and not near your plant roots.
If salinity is already an issue, you may have to limit yourself to what you can grow at the start. It is encouraged to start soil building, and plant crops that are salt tolerant.
Salt tolerant crops like barseem are great because they also contribute to increasing your soil health. Barseem are good cover crops, and this way evaporation is reduced, and you find less salts at the surface. On bare grounds, or loosely distributed crops salt can be seen on the surface.
In very bad situations you may have to plant other crops all together, and take a longer term approach. Some crops are very tolerant to salts, like quinoa. Some vegetables like red beets, broccoli and white and red cabbage. Regarding fruit trees, you can plant certain types like date palms, guava, figs and olives.
Researchers have also produced LactoBacillus, a bacteria that makes salt insoluble, so it will be unavailable to plant roots. It is produced in a laboratory and added to irrigation water. Soil salinization if not dealt with well, and fast, can take us decades to overcome. Let us not wait until the situation reaches irreversibility, and find ourselves incapacited to take action, leaving farmland abandoned. This is not the kind of Eish wa malh we long for, This is the type of malh against our life, Eish we should avoid.
Soil salinity is a challenge that more and more famers are dealing with. The situation started to worsen since the Nile flood stopped and instead was replaced with regular mechanical irrigation. Year-round irrigation pulls salts from deeper soil sediments up to the root zone of the plants. When salt is in close proximity to plant roots – it literally pulls water from them, which weakens or kills them.
It is a sad reality when farmer loose their harvest because of salinity. It is an urgent problem that requires a change in practices.
The first and most obvious is to reduce the amount of water used in irrigation, which could be easily achieved by making raised beds.
The raised beds are wide, and therefore reduce your water needs by one third! This saves you time and diesel money for pumping!
By making raised beds, you protect your plant roots from the accumulation of salt. Because raised beds are at least 20 centimeters high, the salts end up in the furrows, and not near your plant roots. Salinity can be dealt with by growing salt tolerant crops such as barseem. Barseem covers you soil and therefore reduces evaporation. This helps reduces salts appearing at the surface.
On bare grounds, or loosely distributed crops, salt can be seen on the surface more easily.
When soil is extremely salty – it will limit what you can grow to salt tolerant crops such as beets, broccoli and white and red cabbage.
For fruit trees, you can plant certain types like date palms, guava, figs or olives.
Researchers have produced Lactobacillus, a bacteria that makes salt insoluble, so it will be unavailable to plant roots. It is produced in a laboratory and added to irrigation water and sprayed on the plants close to the roots.
Now that we understand the problem the solutions are in arms reach and accessible to us.
If soil salinization if not dealt with well, and fast, can take us decades to overcome. Let move fast in the application of new practices that transform salty soil into flourishing farmlands.
