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If we grow some crop with salt water, we will be literally salting the earth, so unless we are talking about hydroponics/aquaponics, that would be very damaging for the soil and environment. That needs to be consider as well.
hmm how about making a seaweed that grows meat tumors then.
Or just eat the seaweed. Tons of nutrients in there. Plus it tastes great as a salad!
"Nah, we had seaweed last night. Let's have meat-tumors."
If you're growing salt-tolerant crops and only ever intend to use that land as farmland, that could arguably be a benefit, don't have to use as many chemicals to control weeds and pests if the weeds and pests can't tolerate the salt
Probably need to make sure that the salt is being contained to the farm area, and I'd imagine you would need to periodically flush it with fresh water or something if too much salt begins to accumulate in the soil for even your salt tolerant crops.
That seems hard to manage. And there is also the risk of that salt to reach underground water. I would say that it's feasible to do it right, but at a high cost.
Hydroponics seems more manageable IMO.
Good point. Another reason to favor desalination.
It's a good point, but desalination has the same issue. Whenever you use seawater to produce something with almost no salt in it (be it desalinated water or crops), that means the salt has to go somewhere else. Probably in concentrated form.
Desalination may not salt the earth, but brine can create dead zones in the water. There are solutions like diluting it, and there are cases of operators who don't care. Either way, salt is an issue if you use salt water. Has to go somewhere.
Diluting it is just undoing the desalination on the water used to dilute it.
There are better ways to do this. Examples:
In theory, this could give and take the same amount of salt water to and from the ocean, while still providing desalinated water for use.
Another way to dilute brine is to add it to the ocean in small bits in multiple locations, so neither location exceeds a certain salt concentration.