Alpha Beta Foods

Later that morning Hussien took me to Alpha Beta Food Industries. They are using the waste water from their factory to grow crops. They process all sorts of things from tomatoes to faba beans. The beans are soaked and turned into a paste called Foule. It's the water they use to soak them that gets recycled. The water goes in fresh but, to my surprise, comes out at 3.8 to 4dsm. Recycling water is a problem because it tends to pick up salts as it goes so using it is has its drawbacks. Alpha usually runs 30,000 tons of tomatoes through their factory and will probably use the water from that process as well to irrigate crops.

Cactus - a weed for some, a forage for others.

Jordan also has a focus on forage crops and the trial site sets out to encourage farmers to adopt this direction and move away from vegetable and olive trees. Jordan imports 80% of its forage requirement, so there's a big demand on feed for them. With soil salinity going as high as 17dsm in the first metre, I could see the importance of the trial site.

Cactus is an interesting one.  Known more for being a weed throughout northern Australia it was quite happily growing in the cooler climate of Northern Jordan. Capable of producing a staggering 200 green tons/ha. It is a very fleshy plant so it's dry matter production is quite low. There are 84 farms around Khaleia where the trial block is that are involved with the selection of future varieties. It's a great idea to get farmers involved giving them a sense of ownership.

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.