Out and about in the Negev

Salt tolerant Sea Aster had a nice taste

Uri Na'amati pulled up out the front of my hotel in Beer Sheva for what turned out to be a great day.

Uri is president of the Field Crop Growers Association (FCGA) which has around 300 members representing over 200,000 ha. Talking to Uri I learnt no one owns land here, it's leased from the Israel government for up to 49 years. The average family land holding in the Negev desert area is around 8 ha but they typically come together to form a community called a Kibbutz and pool their resources. The average Kibbutz out here is 960 ha which surprised me after travelling through the Middle East where I became accustomed to most farms being 1-2 ha.

Uri took me out to the Ramat Negev Agroresearch Centre and we caught up with Zion Shemer (Director). Ramat has some interesting stuff going on with growing crops with saline water.   

Zion with a novel way to grow stawberries 

Strawberries are easy to pick at sholder height

They have been concentrating on trials for human consumption crops that can handle some salt. We looked at some salt bush, portulaca, salicornia and a very tasty plant called sea aster. All of these were being looked at for salad mixes. The sea aster was very nice and had a less salty taste compared with all the other crops there. I think the natural salty taste of these plants would complement a conventional salad. Zion also took us in to see an innovative strawberry growing system that kept the fruit up off the ground.

One of Uri's desal plants

We had lunch at Uri's Kibbutz which was brilliant and checked out his desalination plant and water storage which was very impressive and has to be the biggest plastic lined dam I've seen with a capacity of 1600 megalitres. As you would imagine water is in demand out in a desert and nearly 80% of the water used for irrigation here is recycled waste water from the major cities like Tel Aviv and it's all delivered to farm via pressurised pipe at around 6 bar. They have a time schedule for irrigation to avoid losing pressure.