What a little moisture can do.

How to apply urea the hard way

There are a lot of vegetables grown in the Liwa Grimace for a desert. The Abu Dhabi and Dubai government want to push more forage crops due to them importing almost all of their forage needs. Contradicting that, it is now illegal to grow Rhodes Grass and Alfalfa (lucerne) in the area. It was deemed to have too high a water requirement . This ties in with some of the work ICBA are doing looking for salt tolerant forage crops to be used throughout the UAE. I still struggle with the fact that forage crops could be considered more profitable than vegetables. A drive around the area proved to be an eye opening experience with lots of vegetables of all types growing happily and all irrigated with saline water. Everything is irrigated with drip systems sporting adjustable push on emitters. Capable of 1 to 100lt an hour they put out a lot of water. The problem is no one is calibrating them. This isn't good as far as efficiency goes but some over watering does help to prevent salt accumulation in the root zone.  Their aquifer is enclosed with little to no recharge....a one way street really.

The Liwa Grimace

I set out for Abu Dhabi to meet up with Rob Cauldwell from the Farmers' Services Centre. The Centre is a new project that the Abu Dhabi government have put in place to improve agriculture in the area. Rob and I went from Abu Dhabi down to Madiraa in the Liwa Oasis (also known as the Liwa Grimace - named for its appearance, looking like a down-turned mouth or grimace on a map).

Mohamed, Spoons and Veggie gardens

A visit to Ibrahim's brother, Mohamed, was a highlight. We ate in Bedouin style, sitting on the floor at a low set table eating with our hands. I was encouraged to use my spoon after a while, no doubt due to my hopeless attempts to mimic my hosts. It turns out eating with your hand with some sort of refinement takes some practise.

Mohamed's garden growing with 5dSm water

Mohamed has some problems with saline water. 25 years ago, his water was 60 metres down; now it's over 300. He has lost a lot of mango trees that once covered his farm. There is an extensive vegetable garden and all manner of livestock. With ground water at a salinity level of 3000ppm tds (4.6dsm) I was surprised to see his veggies looking as good as they were. Making compost out of livestock manure is common here and I feel it's helping his veggies cope with the salt. I spoke with Dr Rao about this and he pointed out that most farmers have kept their own seed for years and have most likely built up a salt tolerance through natural selection.

Here is another amazing thing I learnt while out with Ibrahim, no one pays for water out here. At least not in the places I have been. This has lead to over watering. Land is also gifted and many land owners do not have anything to do with their land except receive payments from the UAE government to own it. There is talk of this changing in the future.

I'm very thankful to everyone at ICBA for making my time there a memorable and successful one.

Dibba experiment station

Visiting the Dibba experiment station to see some trial work being done with thornless cactus for the first time.....I was surprised. I was expecting to see more cacti. In fact, it was the only time I saw a field of cacti throughout the entire time I was in the UAE.

The station runs many trials of local and imported crops.

We covered some country that day travelling to Masafi, Dhaid and Diba Al Hisn. It is a hard and unforgiving land with little to no water. The water they do have is all saline in one form or another. 100 millimetres of rain a year is as good as it gets. I don't think I'm going to complain about a lack of rain ever again.

Dates, Dishdash and Cowboy hats

Ibrahim and some locals

During my time at ICBA, I was taken out to some of the farms and research stations in the area.

My guide for the day was the charismatic Ibrahim Ahmad Bin Taher. We would have been a site to see with Ibrahim, in a typical shumagg and dishdash that most Emirates men wear and me in my cowboy hat, pulling up at a roadside merchant in a car with UN number plates asking to buy some of the local dates. I bet there was some discussion after we left.

I learnt that there is no large scale farming here and most farms are only a couple of hectares at best. Some of the soil I saw had some stone in it but the majority was sandy.

Super Legumes

Sespania sespan only 15months old

I was surprised to see asparagus growing quite happily out on these sandy soils. I've always associated asparagus with cool weather and premium soils. There are a lot of different species of asparagus and some of those can handle hot and salty conditions.

Cow peas (also known as black eyed peas) looked very good to me. Well adapted to sandy soils with good drought tolerance and the ability to fix nitrogen really got my interest.

The amazing Sespania sespan was the most amazing legume I have ever seen. Its height dwarfed me and then some, which isn't a big deal until I was told it was only 15months old. The thing looked like it had been growing there for years.It will handle some salinity and can be grazed.

Salty Sorghum

Salt tolerant Sorghum

I have spent several days at ICBA learning a thing or two about the wide variety of crops that can be grown with saline water. Some are already available in Australia. Triticale was one such plant. I saw lots of varieties being trialled, all of which looked very good and showed no signs of salt damage even after 15 dsm water was applied to them. I was told that Cracker Jack (a Heritage Seeds line from Australia) was doing well. There was a very large sorghum trial there. Starting out as a mini core of 35,000 accessions it has been whittled down to 40 and these will be evaluated for their tolerance as well as other agronomic traits. It was interesting to see such variability in one species as the salinity of the irrigation water applied increased. There were some very good results and the future use of sorghum in a saline environment looked good.

Dr Rao and some very salt tolerant tomatoes

All this sight seeing isn't why I'm here. I'm looking for some answers to using saline water as a viable alternative to fresh water. The International Centre for Biosaline Research (ICBA) in Dubai was the place I'd always intended to visit right from day one. With support from the Islamic Development Bank and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government, ICBA did indeed lived up to my expectations. I'm here to meet Dr Rao who is a Plants Genetics Scientist. He has been working on plant and variety selection for salt tolerance at ICBA for 4 years. I was very excited when we walked into one of ICBA's trial sheds to be greeted by a large tomato salinity trial. Salinity trials for vegetables isn't that common as many people believe vegetables cannot be grown with saline water. This isn't the case as Dr Rao had his trial going with water as high as 20dsm (half seawater) with some good potential. Although the tomatoes are not the only vegetable he plans to trial, it stood out to me that, for a vegetable that is classed as a moderately tolerant species, the tomato has shown the potential for very high levels of salt tolerance. There is plenty of genetic variation out there without modification, coming up with open pollinated varieties that can withstand some very salty water and soil conditions. When I told the researchers there that I was using water that was 4.2dsm they simply smiled and told me anything under 4dsm is considered fresh water here. Talk about bringing a bloke back to earth, it really brings home the fact that most untreated water in the area is highly saline and dealing with it is an every day thing.