Listen to the audio version of the article
Drought, hail, heat peaks are not enough: agriculture is grappling with another issue with a strong impact on crops. The new problem is called “soil salinity”. Salinity is “directly linked to desertification and hydrogeological instability”, recalls Dario Kian, environmental engineer at Ersaf, the Lombardy regional agricultural and forestry services body. From North to South Italy, farmers are on alert. Luckily also the research.
«The problem arises in different ways with the evaporation of water from the soil due to heating, due to the lack of rain, due to fires, or due to the incorrect use of fertilizers or deforestation – explains Raffaele Dello Ioio, professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. Furthermore, the melting of glaciers and poles due to global warming triggers rising sea levels and flooding which leads to rising salt levels.”
25% of irrigated land in the Mediterranean affected
River mouths are also affected by the phenomenon: last year the Po saw saline waters rising from the same mouth. At the University of Pisa, Anna Maria Ranieri is the Italian coordinator of the HaloFarMs project financed by European funds within the Prima projects (Partnership for research and innovation in the Mediterranean area). The professor of the Department of Agricultural, Food and Agro-Environmental Sciences explains the seriousness of the problem by giving two numbers: «About 18 million hectares, corresponding to 25% of the total irrigated land in the Mediterranean area, are affected by the salinity phenomenon» .
Thus in Pisa we are concentrating on the study of halophytes (plants capable of living in saline environments) and HaloFarMs – acronym for Development and optimization of halophyte-based farming systems in salt-affected Mediterranean soil – aims to investigate their adaptation characteristics through mechanisms specialized in absorbing the salts present.
The challenge is resistance
What happens if «we grow these plants in conjunction or in rotation with glycophytic plants (representing the largest number of species cultivated for our food) – the research asks -. Could they resist in saline soils and be productive?”.