Salt makes most crops fail to grow. So why is the land that the Netherlands reclaims from the sea — which has been under salt water for ages — useful for agriculture?
In: Biology
First, you will likely need to bring in soil anyway. There isn’t much substrate that is under the ocean and that you can use to plant food-producing plants in. It’s generally sand, or mud, or gravel, or solid rock, or clay… and removing salt makes clay get even worse. So a lot of the soil would simply be relocated from elsewhere, and can be amended with strategies like piling up seaweeds above the tidemark and letting the rain wash the salt out of them before plowing them in.
Second, the salt actually IS easy to remove for any reasonably viable soils that you can use that have been uncovered. Simply wash the soil by diverting a fresh water source to flow over and through it, or to soak on it as if it’s a pond, and use effective drainage to let the salt-containing water flow away. Eventually the salt washes out, perhaps even through natural rainfall if you have good drainage and enough time.
Next, there are additives like gypsum that can help better remove salt as you wash that soil.
Finally, there are salt-resistant crops that can help deal with any residual salts after this sort of treatment. China grows salt-tolerant rices in tidal basins, for example.
So it’s a mix of strategies, with the biggest factors being the bringing in of soil to replace the poor stuff that damming might reveal, and the washing out of the salts of anything usable that’s left when the ocean water recedes.
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