[New York Times] Dina Kraft - Fish farming in the desert may at first sound like an anomaly, but in Israel over the last decade a scientific hunch has turned into a bustling business. Israeli scientists found that brackish water drilled from underground desert aquifers hundreds of feet deep could be used to raise warm-water fish. The geothermal water, less than one-tenth as saline as sea water, free of pollutants and a toasty 98 degrees on average, proved an ideal match. "We should consider arid land where subsurface water exists as land that has great opportunities," said Professor Samuel Appelbaum, a fish biologist at the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who pioneered the concept of desert aquaculture in Israel in the late 1980s. Farmers use the water in which the fish are raised to irrigate their crops. The organic waste produced by the fish acts as fertilizer for the crops. Fields watered by brackish water dot Israel's Negev and Arava Deserts in the south, where they spread out like green blankets against a landscape of sand dunes and rocky outcrops.
2007-01-05 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive