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Saltwater Agriculture
| Article
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12160 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1994 |
3,057 Words |
| Author
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Edward Glenn and Richard Felger
Edward Glenn, specializing in marine agronomy, is a senior
research scientist at the Environmental Research Laboratory of
the University of Arizona at Tucson. Richard Felger,
specializing in ethnobotany, is adjunct professor at the
Environmental Research Laboratory and president of Drylands
Institute in Tucson. |
The barren flats where the muddy water of the Colorado River meets the salty water of the Gulf of California once were full of life: Writhing river channels flanked by great gallery forests were interspersed with green lagoons and tangled vegetation. Now the once-teeming region is a mud flat, and most of the water that once fed the delta has been diverted for upstream agriculture.
However, Isla Gore, a tidal-flat island in the ex-river delta, is a remnant from that bygone era. Nearby tidal channels and half the island are clothed in a salt grass, namely, Palmer grass (Distichlis palmeri); several other halophyte species (from halo "salt" and phyte "plant") grow interwoven with it. Everywhere there are fiddler crabs guarding their burrows and marine snails waiting for the tide to turn. Isla Gore is probably the one part of the delta ecosystem that exists much as it always has.
Just to the north of Isla Gore the land slopes upward toward the Gran Desierto, the hottest, driest desert in North America. Scattered along the base of that slope are pozos, upwelling freshwater springs rimmed with yellow-green vegetation. Here, as at Isla Gore, that color indicates Palmer grass, which bears full heads of seed that once were harvested by Cocopa Indians as a major food staple.
Inheriting the native wisdom
Some 15 years ago, the Environmental Research Laboratory (ERL) at the University of Arizona at Tucson, then under the leadership of its founding director, Carl Hodges, received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to search the world for halophytes that might be developed into significant food plants. The research began by looking for plants used by native peoples but overlooked by modern agriculture. A few early travelers to the Colorado Delta had written of wheatlike flour provided by the Cocopa, which likely was made from the grain of Palmer grass. The grain is about the size of a wheat kernel but is more like wild rice in flavor. The plant resembles rice in that it can grow in submerged land. But unlike both rice and wheat, or any other modern food crop for that matter, it thrives when irrigated with pure seawater. It also tolerates drought. A drought-tolerant grain crop that might be grown with seawater could be extremely valuable.
Every year in late spring the Cocopa traveled from their riverside homes to camp on the shores and tidal wetlands of the delta. They cut the green, grain-laden seed heads into baskets. Back at camp they dried
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