The drought is not affecting the farmers in the Negev
highlands. Instead of using fresh water, an article in
Ma'ariv says that they have developed a method of
irrigating with the brackish water that is relatively
plentiful there, and they have achieved a major breakthrough:
a hectare of olive orchards irrigated with brackish water
yields four times as much as a hectare irrigated with fresh
water. Brackish water, it seems, is good for tomatoes and
grapes; even St. Peter's fish have become used to it.
One of the pioneers of farming with brackish water in the
Negev is Yoel de Malakh of Kibbutz Revivim. He explains: "In
the past we tried to use brackish water and failed because we
lacked the technology and know-how. There were plenty of
skeptics. The idea of irrigating crops with brackish water
pumped from a depth of 300 meters didn't sound promising. We
started with cotton and then moved on to olives, melons,
tomatoes, and other crops. We get help from the Volcani
Institute, the Faculty of Agriculture, Ben-Gurion University,
and the Blaustein Institute at Sde Boker."
Revivim's olive orchard is now the largest in Israel. Because
the southern Negev has a very large supply of brackish water,
the olive crop is becoming a success story on an
international scale. The trees were specially designed for
mechanical harvesting with modern shaking devices some of
which were refined in Israel. Their olive oil industry will
make it possible to attract more residents to the region.
The tremendous success has elicited the interest of major
entrepreneurs, who are already interested in investing in the
olive orchards.
Growing olives in the Negev with brackish water was preceded
by a scientific breakthrough with other crops. It had already
been proven with tomatoes that the saltier the water, the
sweeter the fruit. The road from there to olives was
short.
The principle of irrigating with brackish water is as
follows: the salt exerts osmotic pressure on the plant and
the plant produces sugars to balance out the concentration of
salts. In olives this is manifested in the production of
extra oil. In a series of experiments, the farmers were
surprised to discover that the trees were producing
astonishing yields: instead of 5 tons per hectare in the
Galil, the yield here is 20 tons per hectare!
