Growing Biofuel and Animal
Feed Using Saline Farmland and
Saline Irrigation
With a burgeoning world population, the demand for food and feed will require that high
quality land, freshwater, and plants currently used for biofuels will instead be needed for food
production. In the future it is unlikely that the U.S., a major food exporter, will be able to divert
large areas of rich soil and fresh water to produce fuel instead of food. Freshwater-dependent
irrigated and non-irrigated farming is also being disrupted by global warming and changing
weather patterns. Rising temperature thaws polar ice causing sea level rise that progressively
inundates coastal farmland, thereby exacerbating the shortage of land arable for traditional
agricultural production. The rich coastal soils that are and will become salinized by rising sea
levels can be used to help meet our fuel production needs.
Biofuel production in America could be
sustained at a high level if an innovative
approach is taken, i.e. if saline soils and water
(liabilities in traditional agriculture) which exist
in vast areas around the world became assets by
using a salt-tolerant plant to produce fuel. In
addition to low coastal farmland, this would
include farmland that has become salinized due
to salt accumulation over years of irrigation, dry
farmland over brackish aquifers, and sandy
coastal deserts. Eighty million hectares of land
worldwide, originally suitable for some form of
agriculture, are now salinized due to human
activities (Barrett-Lennard 2002).
Our partial solution focuses on producing fuel, feed, and other biobased products from a
salt-tolerant plant growing on saline land irrigated with water of salinities up to that of coastal sea
water. The perennial Seashore Mallow (Kosteletzkya virginica) has numerous features that
contribute to its potential as a biofuel crop that can substitute for petroleum-based feedstocks and
for current annual seed crops now used for fuel. Growing a perennial, salt-tolerant biofuel/feed
crop provides a degree of relief for three of the world’s major problems: dependence on
petroleum reserves, global warming as a consequence of the elevation of atmospheric greenhouse
gases, and our enslavement to freshwater for biofuel production.
Click on the icons below to see a short PowerPoint briefing summarizing the important
details regarding this new biofuel crop, a PDF that summarizes the features of this emerging crop
and the 2009 harvesting techniques
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