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By Ashley Stimpson of Nexus Media News for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Sentient/Just and Climate-Friendly Food System-Public News Service Collaboration

In early 2020, a group of Saudi farmers led Vanessa Melino into the desert. Then a plant physiologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Melino was looking for hardy crops that could thrive in harsh conditions — in the Saudi desert, where the over-extraction of groundwater for irrigation has resulted in markedly high levels of salt in the soil.

After driving for hours, the group arrived at salt lakes in the desert, “like glistening white pans you can see from a distance.”

Spindly green shoots of wild salicornia emerged from the water, flourishing despite “salt literally built up in crystals on the surface of the soil,” she said. “These plants are remarkable.”

Salicornia –also known as samphire, sea beans, sea asparagus, glasswort, and pickleweed –is a halophyte, a group of salt-loving species that blossom in conditions that would be fatal to other plants. Recently, scientific interest in salicornia has spiked, thanks to concern over increasing soil salinity—the result of rising seas, prolonged drought, and human activities like deforestation and seawater irrigation.

Saudi Arabia is hardly alone in its salty dilemma. By some estimates, more than half of the globe’s arable land could become too salty to farm by the year 2050. A recent study from NASA predicts that saltwater will taint 77 percent of the coastal aquifers – groundwater systems that deliver freshwater inland – by 2100. These conditions will be a death sentence for many conventional crops, which aren’t bred to handle high levels of salinity.

What will farmers grow in the salty fields of the future? Melino thinks it might be salicornia.

Cultures around the world have utilized salicornia for centuries to produce glass and soap, while countries from France to Turkey to Korea have long regarded the plant as a culinary delicacy. Salicornia proliferates in coastal deltas, mangrove swamps, and salt marshes, growing in small, short bushes. Recognizable by its bright green and knobby stalks—which boast a satisfying crunch ideal for stir-fries, salads, or even pickles—salicornia is high in fiber; its seeds can be used to produce an oil that’s rich in protein and fatty acids.

That’s why Melino, now a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, is working to transform the plant—which grows wild around the world—into a domesticated crop.

While it took our ancestors thousands of years to domesticate wheat and corn, “we don’t have that kind of time,” said Melino. To speed up the process, she and her international research team have gathered the hardiest specimens they could find from all over the world and are now breeding them in nurseries in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Domesticating salicornia would be a huge step forward in getting the plant into the hands of farmers who are struggling to adapt to rising seas and salty soils, said Yanik Nyberg, founder and CEO of Seawater Solutions, a Scottish organization that restores degraded coastland around the world and helps communities adopt climate-friendly farming practices.

In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where 18 million people depend on rice production for their livelihoods and saltwater intrusion is predicted to soon cause up to $3 billion in crop losses a year, Seawater Solutions is teaching farmers to grow salicornia and develop a market for the crop.

Nha Be Nhut, a farm outside Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, once grew lemongrass, watermelon, and squash using pumped groundwater, a method that can hasten saltwater intrusion. Today, its owners are running trials growing salicornia, irrigating the plants with brackish water from nearby canals, and selling it to high-end restaurants in the city, where chefs incorporate it into dishes like salicornia-marinated gazpacho and salicornia pakora.

In eastern Ghana, the organization is working with villagers in the low-lying Volta Delta to restore mangrove forests that have been cut down or overfished, and sow salicornia in the adjacent lagoons. For now, the plant will be used as fish food in aquaculture projects, said Nyberg.

These projects are largely in trial stages, with profit and scalability still a question mark. But a challenge, according to Nyberg, is sourcing reliable seeds.

“Right now, we’re selecting plants from the wild, ones that perform well, and we dish those out,” Nyberg said. “Usually, only about 50 percent survive; it’s definitely quantity over quality.”

“These are pretty wild plants, so germination is erratic,” said Arjen de Vos, whose Netherlands-based organization, The Salt Doctors, develops climate-resilient agricultural systems in salt-affected parts of the world.“Getting their hands on good seeds is difficult for farmers.”

There are other obstacles standing in the way of the broad adoption of salicornia as a food crop, de Vos said. For one thing, little research has been done on pests or diseases that might affect the plants. Another larger issue is developing a market for the crop. “If there’s no market for it, no farmer will grow it.”

Efforts are underway to introduce consumers to salicornia. In the United Arab Emirates, the nonprofits World Wildlife Foundation and International Center for Biosaline Agriculture brought together the country’s top chefs to familiarize them with the food and ways to use it in their menus.Salicornia startups have popped up in Portugal and Poland, and in Ireland, a popular Dublin restaurant features the salty vegetable on the menu.

For now, de Vos said most farmers are taking stopgap steps to adapt to increasing salinity, such as installing drainage systems and breeding conventional vegetables to be more salt-tolerant.

But he worries even those strategies may not be sustainable in the long term.

“Rainy seasons are becoming shorter. People are tapping deeper and deeper, where the groundwater is saltier. The world is running out of fresh water,” he said. “We may not be there yet, but salicornia will be very needed.”

Melino, who’s not involved in de Vos’ or Nyberg’s projects, said there’s something of a “consortium” of people around the world working to make salicornia a viable crop for a warmer, saltier future. “It’s a little bit of a competitive space,” she said, with some scientists, like her, working on domestication and others working on “promoting a culinary relationship” with the plant: “The two can and should happen alongside each other.”

The scientist is hopeful that as research continues, salicornia’s trajectory will look something like quinoa’s, another salt-tolerant crop. The Andean grain prized by Indigenous cultures was neglected for centuries before being “rediscovered” in the last half of the 20^th century and heavily promoted by the United Nations. In 1980, eight countries grew quinoa; today that number is close to 100. By 2034, the grain you couldn’t find on grocery store shelves a decade ago, is projected to hit $2.78 billion in global sales.

With enough investment and interest, Melino believes salicornia might one day be as popular — and that saltwater, instead of being a foe to the world’s food supply, might be its friend.

Ashley Stimpson of Nexus Media News wrote this article for Sentient. If you have a climate solution story you'd like to share, you can do that through Project Drawdown's Global Solutions Diary.