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South Australia is at the forefront of sustainable agriculture this month, with the official opening of a tomato farm in Port Augusta. It's not just any tomato farm. Sundrop Farms is a hydroponic greenhouse facility that doesn't use fossil fuels, groundwater, pesticides or soil. The $200 million, 20-hectare farm doesn't even take up valuable arable land. It's located on arid, degraded land that is too barren for traditional agriculture.
Here's how it works. A solar tower standing 115 metres (377 feet) high with 23,000 mirrors pointed at it provides all the power the farm requires, for heating and cooling. It also powers a desalination plant, which converts seawater into freshwater to keep the plants irrigated.
If it works, there is a lot of "arid, degraded land that is too barren for traditional agriculture" in Nevada and eastern California that could be used the same way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:39PM
would be to produce a saltwater pipeline from the pacific through california and nevada up to Utah, powered by nuclear reactors every hundred miles or so (could power with solar/wind as well, but for cost efficiency a couple well designed nuke plants could keep it running much better.) fed off local freshwater. (the fallback being the saltwater if the reactor's freshwater supply ever failed.) The general idea here would be to provide a renewable supply of salt for the salt flats (which are mined for trace minerals regularly, although not as much for salt anymore due to its non-renewable supply.) while also providing a steady source of water to filter back into the aquifier to help renew the dwindling water tables in the sierra/rocky mountain states. While this may or may not seem cost effective from a citizen/government perspective, from an ecological perspective it would be helping us to temporarily bandaid shortsighted activities caused by overutilization of the rivers and aquifiers in some western states while providing a continued supply of both minerals and water naturally seperated by the environment providing future resources in the force of salt and minerals, and filtered water, plus a renewed salt bed for the salt flats, home of one of the best land speed record trial plains in the world (which thanks to constant mineral extraction and changes in weather is having both fewer opportunities of being flat, and a shorter possible track length as the salt bed shrinks.) Done properly we could provide a solution to a number of problems for a single large public works project the likes of which hasn't been seen since that huge chinese dam.