Remove salt from soil
- What happens if soil is too salty?
That’s because irrigated water contains dissolved salts that are left behind when water evaporates. Over time, concentrations of those salts can reach levels that make it more difficult for plants to take up water from the soil. Higher concentrations may become toxic, killing the crops
Earth’s Soil Is Getting Too Salty for Crops to Grow! Build-up of salts on irrigated land has already degraded about 7.7 square miles of land in arid and semi-arid parts of the world is lost to salinization every day. Today some 240,000 square miles—an area about the size of France—have become degraded by salt. In some areas, salinization can affect half or more of irrigated farm fields.
Crop irrigation in arid regions, such as South Africa’s maize and wheat growing regions, can lead to overly salty soils.
Salt damage can be reversed through measures such as tree planting, crop rotation using salt-tolerant plants and implementing drainage around fields. Such activities can be expensive and take years, but the cost of doing nothing and letting lands continue to degrade is worse, the researchers argue. “With the need to provide more food, feed, and fibre to an expanding population, and little new productive land available, there will be a need for productivity enhancement of salt-affected lands in irrigated areas,” they write.
- Mitigation of high salt content in soil with Chitosan
In recent years, eco-friendly compounds such as chitosan has been used to alleviate the destructive effects of salt stress. Chitosan is a natural biodegradable compound with no toxicity in nature and act as a stress tolerance inductor involved in physiological processes and prevent water loss through transpiration.
Tomato test
Tomato cv. Rio Grande grown in pots was subjected with salinity stress in the form of 4 levels (0, 50, 100 and 150 mM) whose effect was mediated by treating it with different concentration of chitosan (0, 50, 100 and 150 mg L ⁻¹ ). Results The data revealed that various application of salinity had a negative effect on almost all the studied parameters. Tomato plants treated with distilled water having no salinity (control) recorded maximum plant height (cm), average number of compound leaves plant ⁻¹ , leaf area (cm ² ), stem diameter (mm), number of fruits plant ⁻¹ , fruit firmness (kg cm ⁻² ), leaf chlorophyll content (SPAD), fruit juice pH, yield plant ⁻¹ (kg) and minimum total soluble solids (Brix°). Whereas, minimum plant height (cm), average number of compound leaves plant ⁻¹ , leaf area (cm ² ), stem diameter (mm), number of fruits plant ⁻¹ , fruit firmness (kg cm ⁻² ), leaf chlorophyll content (SPAD), fruit juice pH, yield plant ⁻¹ (kg) and maximum total soluble solids (Brix°) were found in plants treated with salinity level of 150 mM. Chitosan concentration of 150 mg L ⁻¹ significantly mediated the effect of salinity stress and recorded maximum plant height (cm), average number of compound leaves plant ⁻¹ , leaf area (cm ² ), stem diameter (mm), number of fruits plant ⁻¹ , fruit firmness (kg cm ⁻² ), leaf chlorophyll content (SPAD), total soluble solids (Brix°) and yield plant ⁻¹ (kg) with minimum fruit juice pH. Conclusion It is concluded that foliar application of chitosan at the rate of 150 mg L ⁻¹ and salinity stress 150 mM could have positive impact on performance of tomato.
Effect of different salinity levels and foliar application of chitosan on morphological criteria and chlorophyll content
Peer Reviews
Several researchers have also reported the positive role of chitosan to mitigate salinity stress in plants (Jabeen and Ahmad, 2013;Krupa-Małkiewicz and Smolik, 2019;Ullah et al., 2020). Pretreatment with chitosan has been shown to reduce salt-induced oxidative damage by increasing the activities of antioxidant enzymes in Zea mays (Younas et al., 2021), Oryza sativa (Martínez et al., 2015), Vigna radiata (Sen et al., 2020) and H. annuus (Jabeen and Ahmad, 2013). ..