Jordan

Medicargo arborta

Hyola 61 was doing very well in this salt tolerance trial

I flew to Amman as I had an appointment with Hussein Mustafa who is part of the National Centre for Agriculture Research & Extension (NCARE). They have a trial site that has connections to ICBA (where I visited in Dubai). Of interest were some cacti, grazing oats, canola, buffel grass and a relative to lucerne, Medicargo arborta, a native of Tunisia.

The Medicargo is a shrub that has the same feed value as lucerne and produces around 5t/ha of dry matter. It was growing in 15dsm soil salinity so the thing is tough. In their trial was a variety of canola that was once available in Australia, Hyola 61.  It was doing quite well in some very saline soils and outperformed all other varieties I saw. It just goes to show there are varieties out there that are quite salt tolerant.