This got me thinking: what would a future look like if saltwater could be utilized by all crops? Corn, rice, vegetables… the world’s population would have access to much more quality nutrition, allowing more humans to thrive. When more humans thrive, there are more people to contribute to society and try their hand at solving larger problems, like global warming. The increased population density of healthy humans would lead to faster transmission of quality ideas, and the effect would ratchet up. Increased population density is why cities are hotbeds for innovation.
With better-growing crops, fewer people would be living as subsistence farmers, and there would be an increase in the number and size of cities.
How could this fit into a story? Maybe, when there is enough food for people, they grow more livestock for meat. This source of meat is taken for granted until a plague begins wiping out pigs and cattle, similar to what happened in Asia with the African Swine Fever.
The story of the Meat Wars would begin locally, and in the third world, countries first helped by the increase in crop production, eventually making their way to the United States.
It would create a society where immigrants were feared. The story could follow a small town in the Bible Belt who has to deal with an outbreak, and how they turn on each other.
The main character is able to solve the conflict, then goes on the road to another town, another city, fixing/dealing with similar situations all over the country.
A recently published article has addressed how rice can be grown in saltwater in the first place.
For centuries, farmers have been cross-breeding successful crops, replanting the most robust after their harvest. Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are made by using science to speed up the process.
Instead of waiting generations after generations to come up with a plant with the desirable trait, scientists go inside the plant’s genome and create the desired change. This is how scientists would be able to create rice that grows in saltwater.
Growing rice takes a lot of fresh water, and if it can be tweaked to grow in saltwater there would be a much smaller barrier for farmers to enter into growing the crop.
This could have massive implications for those in poverty, allowing more rice to grow in less-than-ideal conditions. If regions typically starved for resources, like third world countries near the equator, were able to vastly increase their food production, they could spend resources on other services for their populations, like education and infrastructure.
