Agriculture accounts for around 70% of all fresh water consumed worldwide. In the Middle East / North Africa region, this goes above 85% and in Oman it is 94%1. Unprotected outdoor cultivation can demand more than 4 times the amount of irrigation water, as compared with shaded or more protected cultivation.
Evaporatively cooled, ‘pad and fan’ greenhouses provide a cooler and more humid climate, so that yields are higher and certain crops can be grown year round, even during the summer months which are too hot for unprotected cultivation.
The Sultanate of Oman, like every country in the Middle East, is facing decreasing ground water and increasing salinity. The coastal plain of the Batinah Region where traditionally most agriculture takes place, suffers from a lowering water table and the consequent saline intrusion. Some farmers are pumping ground water from a depth of 100 meters while many farms on the coast have been abandoned due to toxic levels of salinity.
Little incentive for water use efficiency combined with low rainfall (average of 100 mm. per year) has the result that farmers extract beyond the natural refill of the aquifers, which has led to falling groundwater tables. This causes seawater to intrude inland. As a consequence, farmers see a gradual decline in marketable produce, both in quality and in quantity, leading to the point where agriculture is no longer viable or possible.
In Oman, as in many parts of the world, desalination is the only method of meeting the shortfall. Yet desalination is expensive in terms of energy. Even with the more efficient desalination plant, 1 kg of oil can only yield about 1000 kg of freshwater. Using standard methods of irrigation, this amount of water may only yield about 1 or 2 kg of edible crop (see Figure 1 below).
Agriculture accounts for around 70% of all fresh water consumed worldwide. In the Middle East / North Africa region, this goes above 85% and in Oman it is 94%1. Unprotected outdoor cultivation can demand more than 4 times the amount of irrigation water, as compared with shaded or more protected cultivation.
Evaporatively cooled, ‘pad and fan’ greenhouses provide a cooler and more humid climate, so that yields are higher and certain crops can be grown year round, even during the summer months which are too hot for unprotected cultivation.
The Sultanate of Oman, like every country in the Middle East, is facing decreasing ground water and increasing salinity. The coastal plain of the Batinah Region where traditionally most agriculture takes place, suffers from a lowering water table and the consequent saline intrusion. Some farmers are pumping ground water from a depth of 100 meters while many farms on the coast have been abandoned due to toxic levels of salinity.
Little incentive for water use efficiency combined with low rainfall (average of 100 mm. per year) has the result that farmers extract beyond the natural refill of the aquifers, which has led to falling groundwater tables. This causes seawater to intrude inland. As a consequence, farmers see a gradual decline in marketable produce, both in quality and in quantity, leading to the point where agriculture is no longer viable or possible.
In Oman, as in many parts of the world, desalination is the only method of meeting the shortfall. Yet desalination is expensive in terms of energy. Even with the more efficient desalination plant, 1 kg of oil can only yield about 1000 kg of freshwater. Using standard methods of irrigation, this amount of water may only yield about 1 or 2 kg of edible crop (see Figure 1 below).
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