Saline Futures Conference 2019 - Plenary sessions 1
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Tester, Mark
Vos, Arjen de
Gould, Iain
- Genetic characterization of salinity tolerance traits to increase salinity tolerance in crops: Mark Tester, KAUST - “Living with salinity” Can saline agriculture contribute in a sustainable and profitable way?: Arjen de Vos, Saline Farming - Introduction to EPI AGRI Working Group: Iain Gould
 Good morning everyone. Welcome back to the second day of the Sailline Futures Conference. There will probably be a few more people coming in. Do please take a seat. But we're just going to start because we have some wonderful speakers lined up for you. I hope that after yesterday your osmotic stress levels are still in order. My name is Margo and I have the pleasure of being your chair today. And as I said, we have a full programme ahead so I'm not going to take much more of your time right now. So among other things, he has been a professor in plant physiology at the University of Adelaide at a school that would be very much to my liking I suppose, the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine. He was also a professor of bioscience for nearly seven years at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. But he's currently on a sabbatical from there to be the head of the food sector at NEON, which is a futuristic, high-tech, sustainable city of the future. And we're going to learn a little bit more about that. The strength in his research programme has been on the integration of cell biology and whole plant physiology. And I'm very much looking forward to hearing him speak on NEON but also on the genetic characterization of salinity traits to increase salinity tolerance in crops. So please welcome Mark Tester. Thank you very much and it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation to give this talk. That's me? Yep, perfect. So the context of research from my perspective is that you can you put this up on the screen as well. At the moment there's another talk on the screen. Thanks. It's that about a third of the world's food is produced under irrigation by the estimates and that, right, and that about half of the water used for irrigation comes from groundwater and every aquifer that is being used to contribute to that one third of the world's food production is being measurably depleted. Some of them critically so, such as the one under the Punjab in northwestern India, northeastern Pakistan. So a lot of our food production is actually being, is unsustainable, doesn't matter, I'll walk over, I've got legs. Does that work? I know it's... Okay, so anyway, we're mining our water and a lot of our food production is unsustainable and so what we need to do is see if we can access other sources of water and as a speaker said yesterday, you all know probably better than me that most of the water in the world is salty, saline and we're able to... This isn't working. Okay, all right, here we go. So it would be great if we were able to develop technologies, approaches to unlock water that we cannot currently use to help feed the world. So if we're going to unlock something, we need a key and of course there are many keys to helping unlock salt water but one of those is trying to improve the ability of plants, crops to be grown on that saline water and so one of the keys for improving these crops is to use genetics, to improve the genetic composition of the plants to improve their ability to grow in saline water and we can now turbo charge genetics so there's a different context to the 60s, 70s, previous attempts to improve salinity tolerance of crops and that is that we now have genomics and so just as our medicine is facing a revolution, so too is agriculture and so this gives us when you combine it with the huge power now of phenotyping using computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning and so on, we're able to really improve, have lots of opportunities for serious alterations of some of our crops and gives us opportunities to unlock wild germ plasm and we can unlock wild germ plasm to do two things, we can improve the salinity tolerance of crops like we heard with the potatoes yesterday and we can also, as we also heard in various talks yesterday, improve for human use crops that are already highly salt tolerant, we can try to domesticate highly salt tolerant crops and both those approaches have validity, both are sort of given examples here in the pictures where we're improving, we're trying to tap into the salinity tolerance of the wild tomato relatives and there we're trying to domesticate quinoa. Alright, so that's an example of some work that we've published quite a few years ago now where we're improving the, or trying to improve the salinity tolerance of the pasta wheat in this example, which is pretty salt sensitive, it's missing the D genome which has a gene on it which is responsible for keeping sodium out or reduces the amount of sodium accumulation in the chute, that D genome is missing and in fact the corresponding, the homoeologous gene for that sodium exclusion that you see on the D genome is actually missing on the A and B genomes that happened to have been grabbed if you like for domestication ten thousand years ago when the first allotetroploidization of those two grasses occurred to make pasta wheat and so a breeder accidentally was crossing in, well he wasn't accidentally, he was crossing in in the late 60s some diploid wheat relatives and accidentally introgressed into that from one of those wild relatives, the gene that was missing from the tetraploid durum wheat and that greatly reduced the sodium accumulation, greatly increases the salinity tolerance at least in saline conditions. So that's one example of how we can have a go at increasing salinity tolerance of existing crops that's using sodium exclusion but there are many many other traits that contribute to salinity tolerance in our crops and for example here this PhD student Nadia, one of my five Saudi female PhD students by the way, have to rewire your brains a little bit when you're thinking about a lot of these countries. Nadia did some fantastic work with rice looking at the ability or differences in the ability of rice plants to maintain some of their agronomically important traits in saline conditions relative to non-saline conditions. So the ability in this case to maintain transpiration use efficiency, so the production of biomass for the given amount of water transpired and that gets reduced when you add salt, the transpiration use efficiency, but the extent of that reduction is genetically variable and it's controlled by a locus that she found in the rice which is goes straight to a gene which is very helpfully annotated as protein kinase of unknown function. So that's the type of work that we're now starting to try to do more of in my laboratory. But of course we can also get salt tolerant plants and make them more domesticated and improve their use and this is why I started doing some work with quinoa and in this other example where we're doing work not as advanced as our quinoa work but I really want to accelerate to our work on the genetics of salicornia which can grow in straight seawall. Quinoa is pretty good, can sort of go in half seawater and give a reasonable yield but salicornia is amazing, can grow really well in full seawater and that's important. So if we could domesticate salicornia that'd be wonderful, we're working to domesticate quinoa, it's got massive yield potential, massive productivity opportunities, we can get several tons per hectare, this is in the Tibetan Plateau in southwestern China but really it does have I think a huge opportunity in marginal lands where it really is very, very tough in low rainfall environments and in saline soils in this particular example, it's not an irrigated system. This is in central Bolivia where I was on a commune where the leader of the commune said to me we have nothing else but quinoa, that's all they can grow. So that's pretty good testament for the toughness of quinoa and here it is growing on the, right on the shores of the world's biggest salt lake, the Saladi Uni in southern Bolivia. I was there in April taking that photo. So our program is to try to understand some of the traits that can improve, domesticate quinoa, make it a more stable crop with greater yield stability in particular, traits like early vigor, dwarfing, branching and so on, day length and sensitivity, heat tolerance, that's one problem with quinoa, it's not so heat tolerant. So there's genetic variation in all of this and so we're developing a pretty big genetics program where we've got, it's ended up about, to be honest, it's ended up about a thousand lines of quinoa that we've completely resequenced. So we've done a gold standard sequence of the genome and then we've resequenced over a thousand lines of quinoa and then, and the quinoa by the way comes from zero degrees to 42 degrees south in latitude and it goes up to 4,000 meters in altitude and we're trying to do quantitative genetics in the field for traits that are contributing to domestication. We've got this now in field trials across the world and some of these are smaller field trials, some are less successful, some are very, very difficult like here in northwestern Argentina but we do still have several sites and I'm pointing to the two sites in China and the site in northern Australia, really fantastic collaborators and fantastic work going on in collaboration with them. They're starting to try to develop indices, measures for various traits, for example day length and sensitivity. You can grow the plants under short days and under long days and the difference in height in the long day and short day is going to be a reflection of, because it has an indeterminate panicle development. So the longer the panicle is developing, the taller the plant is that's reflecting the sensitivity to short days. It's a facultative short day plant. So that's one measure that we're developing for trying to, you know, with thousands of plants do rapid genetics on the domestication traits. We're doing the same with tomato by the way as well. With wild tomato, saline and pimper nephrolium which is a, got a tidy little genome, it's a tidy little plant and so we're able to relatively rapidly do some genetics of this. We grow them in the field and this talk yesterday mentioned the importance of field trials, I couldn't agree more with that statement. So we're trying to do all of our genetics in the field or as much as possible in the field. And so here we're using drones to fly over our sites where we're growing the plants under low and high salinity. You can see with your eyes the treatments and then try to develop using machine learning algorithms for predicting biomass and for trying to get quantitative traits that are correlating with yield. And then look at the genetics of those traits that the machine learning algorithms have developed themselves. We're also doing this in Arabidopsis, so this works very well advanced with another one of my Saudi female PhD students, Mariam. And so here she's got about 144 traits in Arabidopsis. That's like a practice run for our field work with the saline and pimper nephrolium. And the problem with all of these approaches is that you end up with massive data sets and massive amounts of data that are really hard to handle. And the students in my lab, there were four students all doing sort of fairly similar genetics projects with multiple traits and large data sets. And they got together with one of my post docs, Magda, and developed this app that they call MV app, multivariate analysis app. I really commend it to at least your students. Many of us in the audience are too old for this, but the students, I'm including myself. Now this is a fantastic app and I highly recommend it. It's just, I think it's just come out. It's just come out in plant physiology, I think literally just in the last month or so. But the app's been online for a year and we've already had thousands of downloads. People are using it. I think it is quite good. Okay, and it's all open source, so on. So anyway, this is just a little summary of some of the work that we've been doing. Yep. And just my intellectual journey, if you like, for what that's worth without sounding too pompous. I started in Cambridge as a physiologist, trained as a classical physiologist. And I sat there thinking I was smart and I knew the physiological traits were important for salinity time. So I wrote a paper 10 years ago where we said, these are the three traits which are important. And thought I could even guess the genes. And then I had post docs and students working on specific genes because I thought I could see those genes in the genome and I thought they're important. And so I learned quite a long time ago, about 15 years ago, actually a forward genetic approach. Let the plants tell you what's important, what genes are important, what loci. You end up with all this informative stuff like protein kinase of unknown function. But at least you've got a hypothesis then that is worthy of testing because you know that protein kinase is important because the plants have told you so. So I then moved from physiology and reverse genetics to taking forward genetic approach to study physiological traits and that's fine. But over the last year or so, two years, I've been realizing that we don't even know a lot of the time what physiological traits are actually contributing to salinity torrents. And really now, I'm increasingly just, as I've learned more, I've learned that I don't know lots more. And I'm letting the computers tell me what traits to measure and I'm letting the plants tell me what genes are important for determining those traits. So it's just an interesting little path that I've undertaken. That's all very well. We also have to deliver our research. And I got together with an engineer with whom I was very closely collaborating, a man called Ryan Leifers. We published papers on greenhouse cooling and that sort of stuff, salt water agriculture. And he and I, with my plant science and my salt torrent stuff and his salt water engineering we got together and formed a company called Red Sea Farms and the first low hanging fruit, pun intended, that we thought we would try to commercialize with salt water cooled greenhouses where we're growing salt tolerant tomatoes in the greenhouse on diluted sea water or brackish ground water. In the greenhouse that's cooled using sea water, that's actually got three patents to cover that technology, we had to have three inventions to get it to really work and we have a roof which is cleaned with no water which we did in collaboration with another company that was developing waterless cleaning of solar panels. So we picked up their technology and adapted it for the greenhouse. And so we end up with a system where depending on the temperature and humidity up to 95% of the fresh water that would normally be used in a normal greenhouse is substituted with sea water. And that's pretty good. So we raised funding to build a 2000 square meter greenhouse where we're testing, improving our technology and also showing that the technology works to potential customers and potential investors. So that's the company and in the future we're aiming to then of course move that out into other systems in the field and not just tomatoes of course. So that was, I was happy doing that and then four months ago I was asked to join this project called NEON and people are interested in this project so I thought I'd give you a few slides about it and introduce you to NEON because it is a pretty interesting project, it's what they call a GIGA project, well that's worth which has got half a trillion dollars of finance which is then deployed into 16 sectors to build a new city, build a new society. And the idea is for this to be a sustainable, high tech city of the future. And it's in the far north-eastern, northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia on the border with Jordan and Egypt, this is Sinai and it's actually more than just a city, it's about 25,000 square kilometres about the size of Belgium or the size of Massachusetts for the Americans in the audience and you can even see it now marked on the plain maps, it's actually being indicated as a country, it may actually end up with its own independent constitution and actually be a free standing entity, a free standing country in the future. The point is that on that 25,000 square kilometres there are 7,000 people and basically nothing. So it's got a lot of opportunities to build something that is pretty fresh. The 16 sectors are summarised here, it's all fair, I mean some of it's questionable but most of it's fairly reasonable and obvious, you need energy, you need water, you need transport, you need health and wellbeing, you need education, you need food. And I'm the head of the food sector there. And the food sector our job is to build a food system where you have the research, the growth, the distribution and the consumption and this system has to be secure, which means the food has to be available and accessible, it has to be safe and healthy and we have to be doing it not just for us but for the future, it has to also be sustainable. And sustainability is one of the issues that really is a huge challenge for what we are doing. We're all in the food sector in this business most of us and arguably we're actually in a sector which is the most damaging, environmentally most damaging sector on the planet. We use half the land that humans need, we use over two thirds of the water that humans use and our sector is also responsible, it's the second biggest emitter of carbon dioxide or carbon dioxide equivalents, primarily through methane emissions from cattle and rice paddies. So we're an extremely damaging sector and we need to be actually doing more of what we're doing, we have to increase food production quite significantly. Furthermore we're unbelievably wasteful and about 30% of the food that we produce from harvest on to consumption is either lost or wasted and that is preventable in almost all cases. The other dimension where we fall very, very short is a food system, it's with human health and we know, you know, obesity now is a bigger killer than undernourishment, more people go to bed fat than hungry and of course hidden hunger, it's way swamps all the other issues, the world's biggest health problem by a mile that gets pretty close to zero press and really doesn't get enough attention from us people as well personally. So there's huge malnutrition which has massive economic costs because of insufficient ingestion of vitamin A, iron, zinc, iodine. Okay, but don't despair, we also have lots of opportunities to try to address these problems and try to improve in particular, well both the sustainability and the health of the food sector and I see much opportunities with digital technologies and biotechnologies, digital technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, biotechnologies with genomics and phenotype in which in turn is supported by the digital sector and I do see we have lots of opportunities to improve the security of our food production systems, improve the health of the food that we produce and also reduce the loss and waste that really is unforgivably enormous in our system. So at NEON my job is to try to build a food sector and I'm focusing primarily on the sustainability of the food sector. I'm actually an optimist in terms of the food production that we have to deliver to the planet by 2050 but I am not optimistic about the true environmental sustainability of what we're doing and that's my primary concern and so I want to try to build a food, the world's most sustainable food system, it's in a pretty tricky spot as well up in the Northwest of Saudi Arabia. So what we're going to do is produce as much locally as makes sense, as makes sense economically and environmentally and we're going to try to leverage our various benefits of NEON such as the low disease load in that isolated environment and also the fact that we've got a clean slate regularly so we can develop regulation which is biotech friendly and supportive of innovation and our local production is going to be riding off the work of the energy and water sectors where all the energy at NEON is going to be zero carbon emissions, it's going to be all solar and wind power and the storage will be based because it's of economies of scale, it will be based on hydrogen, you don't need Elon Musk's silly batteries and the water is all going to be from desalination, we're not going to use groundwater and because the aquifers are not discharged in that region but we are able to develop systems for water desalination which is coming from carbon free emissions and we'll have zero liquid discharge, okay so we'll have zero liquid discharge from the water because they're going to mine the brine and extract minerals from the brine so that enables us to build a local production system which is very sustainable, uniquely so but that still means we can only produce about one third of the total food that humans need, we're never going to grow the wheat there, we're never going to grow rice in this area, it makes zero sense to do that but what we want to do instead is import what we can from sources that are as sustainable as possible and for that we need to have traceability, we need to know where the food has come from so we need to have these blockchain based food tracing systems and we need to have good quantitative scientifically driven measures of sustainability, I don't want this organic stuff I'm sorry, I know a lot of you in the room are organic and do organic farming and so on but to me organic was a fantastic concept from the 70s primarily, 60s and 70s which really lost its way in a big way and has really become overtaken by marketing and by human emotions and has lost the scientific quantitative drivers that are really true measures of sustainability and I think this is something that we really need to be looking at ourselves much more carefully, I want to develop a system which is what I call beyond organic where we're going to be looking at measures of sustainability that are not, these are the words from the organic legislation, traditional, natural, ecological, I want to do things which are quantitative and scientifically driven and transparent to producers, distributors and consumers, okay I better stop but that's the system that we're going to end up building, it's the framework for the system where we're able to generate about 70% of our local fruit and vegetables and seafood but much less of the staples and the dairy so then we have to have sustainable sourcing of imported food and then we try to generate a whole pile of innovations to improve what we're doing so we're going to do the best we can and then develop and adopt technologies to make what we're doing better, alright of interest to perhaps many of you in this room we're going to set up a research fund as well which will be completely international competition where we're going to have projects funded, competitively funded but focused on very, very specific areas which, that's going to be a moving feast but the idea is that's my list to start with and then that's open for criticism comments, let's make it better to focus on trying to develop technologies and deliver technologies to improve the sustainability of the system given the context of NEOM where it's very hot and very dry so I'd like to thank my group, my wonderful research group in Saudi, I'd like to thank you for listening and I'd just like to advertise the fact that we're recruiting. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you Mark. So I think we have room for a few questions. I have this device that I can throw or maybe I can get some help. This is a microphone so is there anyone with a question for Mark over there? We could throw that. And you have to speak into the black thingy. In the beginning you talked about your genetics and also genomic, how far are you going in this plant physiology? Are you sequencing the whole genome? Are you using caste techniques to remove pieces of DNA and to set in new pieces of DNA? Most of the modifications of DNA and the crops that we're generating is from natural variations so it's usually using traditional breeding which I say is turbocharged with the genomics so we're able to select the seedling stage for example rather than going through and refiner typing the plants. So it's genomic accelerated breeding. Okay. No GM, I'm a realist. Any more questions? Over there? Would you like to give it a go? Oh good throw. My question was you said that you were critical about the farming practices that we have had over the past several years and you mentioned that the indicators of sustainable farming as we have today in organic crops and stuff are not sufficient. And since you're starting things from scratch, do you have certain indicators in mind that you would like to see on crops being imported into new? Yeah that's an excellent question and out there at the moment there's a huge area of academic work on sustainability, on measures of sustainability. There are only two companies to my knowledge that are making even a partial adoption of sustainability measures. One of them is Mars, is my cocoa sustainably sourced or not and another one is Unilever interestingly given they're responsible for so much rainforest destruction. But anyway the area is and by the way there's no city that has sustainable sourcing of food all right, some schools, some local councils, there are people trying to do it. Milan, the city of Milan is probably one of the most advanced and they wrote a report and that was published two years ago but to my knowledge there's been no action on that report. So one of the first things I'm going to be doing during next year is actually having an academic conference. I'm going to try to bring together as many of these different people who know heats more than me about measures of sustainability and see if we can start to smash some of this together. But as I say 400 different measures that we could count so far with the I mean relatively amateur auditing of the field. So to non-answer. I see another question over there. Yes? Yes? guest currently Yeah, that's a perfectly excellent. Yeah. Okay. So the question is, I mean, I've lived in the region quite a long time now. I mean, not as long as you. Yeah, inside Saudi Arabia, my perspective is actually, it's got a long way to go as a country, but it is changing very, very rapidly. And it's changing in the right direction, as I say, to cynical Americans. The country's changing rapidly as well, but not I think the way we want. And that's an important part of the answer to your question. I think there's a bigger political will. So I said in my slide introducing Neon, I said it's got financial and political backing. And this is really, really important. And I think a lot of the projects come and go, because I think the rather overblown egos of some of the many of the leaders in the region find that some mega project gets established, but it's established by an 80 year old man who then dies three years later. And then the project dies with him before it had time to really get traction. And the next leader comes along and says, well, I'm not interested in that. That's got my uncle's name on it. I want something with my name on it. And the great thing about Saudi Arabia, an advantage of Saudi Arabia in these big projects is that the leader who's pet project, this is his number one project, he's only 32. So it's quite likely that he's going to be around for a very, very long time. And so that means there's a lot of political buy into that project. So I think the prospects for any of those ego driven, well, politically driven, perhaps I should say, projects is more rosy than it is for most of those previous ones. I think it is a different context for Neon. Oh, I beg your pardon. Sorry. Ah, right. Okay. Okay. Yep. Yep. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Want to be successful here. Yeah. Okay. Okay, great. Okay. So I think there's two steps to try to answer your question. I think Neon is going to be something which is going to develop, let's say it develops, it's successful. Then I would expect that the structures and innovations that are in Neon will, if you like, invade back into the body of Saudi Arabia and will reform Saudi Arabia. So I think a lot of the reform in Saudi can be internal, of course, but a lot of the reform has to be from an external, if you like, reinvasion back into the kingdom from Neon. I'm probably speaking very much politically out of turn here. But even if the legislations and innovations in Neon can't go directly, like they can go directly back into the kingdom, I'm sure that they can go indirectly by way of example to benefit Jordan, Egypt as the immediate neighbors and perhaps beyond as well. I mean, I'm a bit out of my depths to be honest with you, but I think when people see something that's successful, they analyze why is that successful? That's because we've reformed the constitution and we've got a different set of regulations and structures. Maybe we should be doing some of that as well. So I would hope that it could form an example. I use the word exemplar for the region. But fingers crossed, who knows? Thank you, Mark. I think this is all we have time for, but if you have any more questions about his research or Neon, do ask him in the break. So thank you. So we've zoomed in a little bit on the... We've zoomed in a little bit on the genetics and on Neon, but now we're going to move towards something else with a man who has been specializing in saline agriculture for about 19 years. He's got a PhD in saline agriculture from the Free University of Amsterdam and he's been working on a practical approach to identify salt tolerant crops on the Isle of Tessel and he's been implementing this in countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kenya and it gives him great satisfaction to see usable results here in the Netherlands and also in the countries that I just mentioned. But I guess the question is, can saline agriculture contribute in a sustainable and profitable way? So let's hear it from Ariane de Vos. Thank you for the introduction, Marko. Good morning everybody. Just one second to come up with the presentation. Yeah, that's the last slide. That's a bit quick. Can you help me? Sorry. No. Yes, thanks. So, yeah, the last few years we heard more and more that we have to live with salinity and we couldn't agree more. That's Marko said. We've been working on this subject for a long time already. Much more from a practical point of view. So we do a lot of applied science and really to try to make the difference in the field to help the farmers with adaptive farming systems and to increase the yields under saline conditions. So that's really our driving force to help farmers increase their yields in the field. I will show in the presentation how we're doing that with the applied science here in the Netherlands, but also the implementation we're doing in different countries. But as also Mark said, we have to do it in a sustainable way, of course. We have to salt tolerant crops, but there are many issues with saline agriculture. If you want to put it into practice and especially if you want to do the upscaling, you have to focus on sustainability. And of course also it has to be profitable for farmers or else even the best innovation will not succeed, of course. Sorry. Oh, sorry. That's not easy. Sorry. So the potential is there. If you look at what saline agriculture can contribute to the world, now there are millions and millions of hectares of salt affected land. There are millions of farmers who are affected by salinity. There are vast amounts of saline water that you can use for irrigation. And if you can use that water, it's going to make a huge difference with the water stress in the world. If you can restore salt affected farmland, make it productive again, we can stop deforestation. It's all great claims, of course, but does it actually work in practice? That's our main challenge that we are working on. But for sure, the potential is there. So the question is, does it work? And a lot of people, they're working on salt tolerant crops. And that's of course the starting point. There's no saline agriculture without the salt tolerant crop. But we cannot forget about the soil and the water, of course. I think it was already mentioned a few times in the conference, but there are a lot of issues with soil, especially heavy clay soil and salinity, of course. What about the water? How can you use it for irrigation? There are a lot of issues with the soil structure and the soil fertility, of course. And if we don't address that, then it doesn't work in practice. And also, you have to be very practical because it's farmers who actually grow the food, of course. You can develop a salt tolerant crop, but if it doesn't reach the farmers and if they don't adopt these crops and varieties, there is no saline agriculture, of course. And now we have a very practical approach on that. For farmers, usually it's seeing is believing, so you have to be active in the field, set up good demos, show to them that it's easy to do more or less, that it's reliable, stuff like that. And of course, if you have salt tolerant seeds, it has to become available for the farmers. If you only have a handful of seeds, we're not going to change the world, of course. So these are all very important aspects. And of course, the market value, as I said, it has to be profitable for the farmers as well. And it takes a lot of policy as well and capacity building. And that's still only the starting point because the next challenge, of course, is that if you have good demos, if you have good pilots, how do you do the upscaling? How do you turn millions of hectares of farmland into saline agriculture? And that's a difficult question with a complex solution, of course. But I can show you how we're working on that. So first of all, there's the classification of salinity for soil, of course. And this is a classification based on the threshold and slope model from Maas and Hofmann. So then you have, of course, the sensitive crops that are already affected by really low salinities. And now you have all these different classes. And now this is taken from the old FAO classification. And in that paper, it says that the yields are unacceptable if you have more or less a salinity level of 10 or 11 desicciments in your soil. But we heard a lot of stories already that there are many crops out there who can survive much higher salinity levels. So why is still this more or less the international standard? So that was one of the questions we had when we were working on the applied science. And I'll show that in a minute. But it's also our approach that normally we start with measuring the salinity of a specific location. And we're looking for crops that match the salinity level. So that's really your adaptation. It's not trying to lower the salinity of the soil because you want to grow this specific crop, but it's really adapt to the present salinity levels. So this is in yesterday's session Gerrit von Strahten, who is still here. He presented our work on an improved methodology to define crop salt tolerance. And because the classical way is to say there's this maximum salinity level that you can still have 100% yield. And what is often also used is that at what salinity level do you still have 50% yield? But if you go to a farmer and say you can still have 50% yield, I can guarantee you that he's not interested because with only half your yield, it will never work for a farmer, of course. And the other thing is that it's difficult to get uniform results. If you look at the literature, you get results from same crops with big range in salinity tolerances. And why is that? So we were really working on that with all the data we collected here in the Netherlands at our test field on Tesla. That's part of the excursion tomorrow. So in short, this paper evaluated all the results and it evaluated also this system of the threshold and slope model. And in short, what appears to be a much more robust alternative is what we call the EC90. So that's not the point where you have 100% yield, but the salinity level that you still have 90% yield. And that's much more consistent and robust than this 100% level. And it's also a good starting point to get more consistent results from year to year. And that's another paper that especially Gerritus is working on because a soil tolerant crop has to be consistent from year to year as well. You have to have some predictability in what a crop can do under the actual field conditions of course. And this method helps with that as well. So what we are applying now is a little bit different classification. So we say don't focus on the 100% yield but to the 90% yield. And also we often focus on the salinity level that you still have 75% yield because in many cases there's still a viable business model for the farmers with 25% yield reduction, especially if you also have a crop with a high yield potential. Because you can have a soil tolerant crop, but if the yield potential is low, you know, yeah, you're not convincing farmers. So you really need this combination of soil tolerance and high yielding. And sometimes a high yielding variety is better than a soil tolerant variety because yeah, farmers just looking at how many tons per hectare am I harvesting. And if you look at this classification, officially, if you really want to talk about a soil tolerant crop, you know, you still need to have optimal growth around eight days of seeding, you know, with this class. And at higher salinity levels, of course, we hear a lot about the quinoa and the salicornia in the presentation, you know, and also beets, you know, they're quite tolerant. So for sure, there are plenty of crops that you can grow above this 12 and, you know, even see water salinity, of course. But yeah, for us, it's also important to to help farmers. And often they like the crops that they know with good market potential, of course. And that's an extra challenge of the HelloFights. You know, the often the business model, the market, it has to be developed hand in hand with the whole breeding process. Because if there's a small market, then you also have only a few farmers that you can help, of course. So how do we find these soil tolerant crops? Well, I think the image of our test facility on the island of Tesla has been shown before. So we do a lot of applied research here. Normally, we start with with large scale screening trials. So then we use only two salt concentrations. And for instance, for a project in Bangladesh, I will show a few slides in a minute. Now the farmer preference was really about the brassica crops. So they like the cabbage and they like the cauliflower and the kohlrabi, you know, crops like that. Yeah, and we just try to get as many different varieties as possible and test it under these controlled field conditions. Because up until now, we always see that if you plant many different varieties of a single crop, you always find some varieties that are more salt tolerant. So we're not breeding for salt tolerance, but there are already some varieties out there who have a higher natural level of salt tolerance. So we go from for instance, from 100 different varieties to only five or 10 based on the selection trials. And know that the top five that we determine the exact level of salt tolerance at the open air lab. So here we can irrigate with seven different salinity levels with the maximum of eight repetitions. And it's it's great work. It's fantastic science. But we mostly do it because we use it as a reference from for the salt tolerance. And then we determine we use it as a reference for when we go to other locations, you know, to, to make the comparison, you know, what about your yield potential and yield gap that we can improve the cultivation under the local conditions. So these are some examples. So a lot of the data has been published in this report. It's on our website. That's data up until 2015. In all the years on Tesla, we've tested about 50 different crops and 800 different varieties. So we got a good idea of which crops and which varieties work well. Here are two examples from potato and carrot. And for instance, this potato, I was talking about this EC 90. If you look at the FAO data, they say your 90% yield should be about 2.5 deci-seamins. So that should be somewhere around here. But you see with this potato variety, you know, we still get good results around eight deci-seamins. And the same is true for for carrot. Officially, it's listed as a salt sensitive crop, which is quite strange because the wild carrot is a coastal plant, you know, I have no idea why they think it's a salt sensitive crop. But indeed, with the research we've been doing, you know, this, the yield potential at moderate salinity levels is very good. And of course, this is just one year data. And we're working now on combining several years of data into one image, one number for salt tolerance. And but no, we already see that only with selection, we can get much further than than a lot of people think. So all nice and well controlled field conditions in the Netherlands. But does it also work in other countries, in other climate zones with different temperature, day length, you know, soil type. So that was our next challenge, of course. And yeah, one of the issues you have to take into account, of course, is your soil structure. Just a quick illustration about that. You know, normally your soil has a nice open structure, but with salinity, you can get really compact, you know, water logging, just an illustration we use in the trainings. And if you don't take care of this, you know, the effect of this on your crop growth and your crop yield can be bigger than the actual salinity. And the same is true for water, you know, if you don't have any water, you don't have any agriculture, you know, so we often join our forces with the water companies like Acacia Water and Nectara, who help us to develop really sustainable water systems to do the rainwater harvesting and come up with smart solutions to really use all the water resources in a sustainable way. And also, you know, just your soil preparation, this is just a quick image that we're using also in Bangladesh. You know, just if you have raised beds, you know, that your salinity accumulates in a different way than if you just have full field conditions. Now, so with these raised beds, we can more or less steer that the salinity accumulates a little bit in between the plants and the plant itself in the root zone, the salinity is a bit lower. Yeah, you get much better results. And in the end, in Bangladesh, the monsoon comes and then this soil accumulation is leads down again. So on a yearly basis, it's a sustainable system for sure. So all these little tricks combined, you know, we've been implementing it in different countries. We started in Pakistan. So these are all the different potato varieties that we've tested in the Netherlands. So we went with six potato varieties to Pakistan. So we don't say this is the salt tolerant potato, because you can never predict if the winner on Tesla was also the winner in another climate zone. And you clearly see for instance that this plot, you know, yeah, the yield is nothing. And it had to do with sea dormancy. We found out it's not salt tolerance. But that's the detail, you know, that variety didn't match the local climatic conditions. But you do see these other varieties performing well. So we have these demo plots. We have lead farmers who are implementing this on the first level. And from there on, we wanted to do the upscaling. But we also found out that the local salinity measures, the analysis were a bit different than what we are used to. So they took samples from this plot, and they called it low salinity. But we took our own samples with our tool kit. And yeah, it was like sea water salinity. So there was a very big difference. And two weeks later, we got this image. Well, that's not suitable for potato production. I can assure you that. And also, you know, these water logging conditions, you often see that in the field. You have a big variation in the field. So this is one potato variety with bear patches. And you have good growth. You know, you see that in one field. So you have to tackle all these problems. And in the end, we succeeded because this is a part of Pakistan where they said it's too hot. It's too salty. Farmers don't know how to grow potato. But we got very good yields on that. Even better than the national average under freshwater conditions. And the salinity level was close to this eighth again. So what we also saw in in Pakistan is that it's more or less moderate salinity, but big issues with with the yields in the field. So just speed it up a little bit. Looking at the time, this is a project and it's going to be in a session this afternoon presented by about bruining. But this isn't a project we did in Kenya. So this is one of the carrots varieties that we selected and identified. And this is the local variety. And together with the soil and water management, we already reached a 94% yield increase in in year one. And we saved almost all the groundwater extractions with this water management as of all. We also did a training in Egypt. So we always do very applied training. So we are also indoor explaining the theory, but putting it into practice is really important. So we're training the staff of the university and the students to become extension officers. And they also go to the farmers. And one of our biggest projects is in Bangladesh. So here you see the coastal area of Bangladesh. And just quickly to see it's over a million hectares of salt affected by the drought. But the majority 44% is in this range of now between four and 12. So it's only moderate salinity conditions. But still, the farmers, they only grow one crop per year in this coastal area during the monsoon. They have rice, then there's plenty of fresh water. And in other parts of the country, they have two crop seasons more in the year. But here they don't even plant during the dry season because of the salinity issues and the water issues. But the majority of the land is only moderately saline. So what we did is we're building their local test facility where we can do the validation trials from the other the crops and varieties that we found in the Netherlands. So we're making these local cultivation strategies with the fertilizer, working on new types of irrigation. But we're also using it for training and capacity building. And we're also testing the summer crops because the summer crops, you know, they have to be heat tolerant as well. And we can't test that in the Netherlands, of course. So we're doing a lot of training and research, but also a lot of training of the lead farmers. So we have 200 lead farmers. So we are training the trainers. The trainers are training the lead farmers and the lead farmers are training the local farmers. So combined, we are training 5000 farmers already. And now here you see this raised beds. We do the crop rotation. And we're introducing six different crops now. And I'll talk more about this in the session I have this afternoon. But for sure, there's a good business model for these farmers in Bangladesh. So what I also wanted to say is, you know, we also see now that, you know, the crops and varieties and the strategies we've developed in the Netherlands, they also work for these smallholder farmers in different parts of the world. But yeah, it's great that we have these results. But you know, how can we make sure we have upscaling, you know, and how can you have the real impact or the real big impact? So that's for sure the next challenge. And yeah, it's only text because yeah, we don't have any pictures yet of the real upscaling with millions and millions of hectares, of course. But no, these are the approaches that we're working on. Now, and this is more for the regional approach, you know, you have to do the salinity assessments and, you know, come up with the good adaptation programs for sure. And it has to be again, affordable and profitable, especially for the smallholder farmers that are often faced with salinity. No, so now that's all the innovations we're working on. And I think on a larger scale, you know, we have to put saline agriculture for sure more and more on the international agenda. I think there's a lot of attention for it. And also a conference like this, it can really help to put together all the knowledge in all the different areas of the world because there's a lot going on. But it's, yeah, I think it can be coordinated better or at least inform the rest of the world even better, you know, not only through scientific papers. You need the adaptation plans for sure. And in the end, again, you know, you have to help the farmers, you know, you have to do this training and capacity building, make sure that the seeds are available and also make breeding for salt tolerance, you know, for the breeders themselves. We have a lot of contact with them. But yeah, they always say, yeah, but none of our customers ask for salt tolerant seeds. And the farmer said, yeah, but there's no breeder who can offer me salt tolerant varieties. So this is a little bit of chicken and egg story, you know, yeah, if nobody is asking for it, nobody will develop it. And if nobody is developing it, yeah, nobody is asking for it, of course. So that's for sure a challenge that needs to be addressed further. And also, yeah, of course, we need the policy. Now, for instance, in Bangladesh, the import for drip irrigation is so high, you know, that it's, you know, the tech, the taxes for import, you know, that it's not affordable for smallholder farmers, just because yeah, there's this standard import tax, you know, and if you cut those tax, it can be affordable for the farmers, you know, just, yeah, there's more or less small details, but they're really important. And also, yeah, one of our ambitions is to have a whole network of research and training centers all over the world, different climate zones, good interaction between the research centers, you know, to really help each other to develop the soil tolerant crops, but also that the cultivation strategy and the market. And again, you know, this market potential, it has to be there, or else farmers and the whole agro value chain, you know, they will not be mobilized, you know, so don't forget about that. So in summary, where I started with, but I'm also going to end with it. So we believe we really need a more uniform way to measure soil salinity, but also to determine crop soil tolerance. For sure, there are already crops that can be used, and we can put it into practice today already. But yeah, you need further breeding as well, of course. But again, saline agriculture is also a multidisciplinary approach, you know, don't only focus on the crop, you have to look at the soil and the water as well for sure. And yeah, the upscaling is really the next challenge, you know, and for sure, we're going to need a lot of cooperation with that. And you know, let's let's do that. No, I think a conference like this is a good, good start. A lot of knowledge is here. And if we put everything into practice, I think we're going to have a much bigger impact than we have today. Thank you. Thank you. I think maybe we started a little bit later, but I'm trying to catch up on time a little so you can get a nice break. But maybe we can take one question. Is there anyone who wants to ask a question? Yeah, over there. And the microphone is quite close. So thank you. Thank you for the presentation. It was really interesting. You mentioned your training program a couple of times, and I'm really interested in the program. You described going from trainers to lead farmers to farmers in the field. But I was wondering is there some kind of quality control and the different steps of training? And does it also include, for instance, like some kind of feedback loop so that you also capture the experience from the farmers in the field doing the tests and doing the work? Yeah, it's part of the training that there's this evaluation moment and all the trainees can fill in the evaluation form. So that's one way that we get feedback. And for us, the most important feedback is to also see the results in the field because we always do very practical training. So we are really in the field with the farmers or at demo sites. And getting those results in, that's very important for us to see if the farmers are enthusiastic, if they want to do the upscaling in the next season. And if a farmer says, next year I'm going to do my whole field in this way, then we know we get good feedback for sure. Okay, thank you very much. So then we're moving on to which is more of an announcement as I have understood. We have Ian Gould from the University of Lincoln to tell us a little bit more about the EIP focus group. So I'll just hand you this microphone. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, yes. I know that it's allocated 15 minutes, but I'll be a lot quicker so you can all get your coffee break. The last thing you want is another Brit asking for an extension on things. So we'll, it's that one there. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. I just click. Yep. Okay. Fantastic. Thank you. Okay. So, yeah, my name is Ian. I'm from University of Lincoln. I'm also part of the Salfa team. And I'm just giving a very, very quick sort of promotion or just let you know about a working group that some members of this group are actually part of, which the EIP Agri focus group on soil salinization. So what it is really is the EIP Agri group have compiled 20 experts from across Europe, or with expertise in soil salinity and that could come from sort of from groundwater or from irrigation. We've got people who work in glass houses, people who work on farm and trials and stuff like that from around Europe. We can see here that soil salinization is a huge problem in Europe, quite a lot of focus in the south. But also you can see here there's also instances in northern Europe and particularly in the continental European land as well where sort of geological salts are causing a problem for soils. So what this focus group does is it's got, it's basically two sessions. We have a meeting, we've had a meeting in May and we've discussed a range of topics which focus on where are the areas affected, identify good practice that's going on throughout Europe, exploring opportunities of adding market value to any maybe potentially saline products, potential of other crops we are not using at the moment but maybe more niche crops that are saline tolerant. And other stuff, so soil remediation is one of the topics discussed and addressing where there are gaps in our knowledge, where there's a need for knowledge across Europe. So what we've done is we had a meeting in September in May and then we've gone away, we've got lots of different working groups and we meet again in October and summarized, we've all done some homework and we're all exploring the issues in our own countries and around those themes. We all meet again in October in Spain and after that we'll put together a final report which will be accessible on the EIP Agri website and it's kind of a knowledge sharing platform, there's people from industry and from the scientific community and the idea is just to compile what we've found out and let it be accessible to all. So everyone will be able to access that when it's put out. So this is basically a very quick plug to say this is going on and it will be really good when it's finalized if people would like to access that and I'll be around at the coffee breaks to if anyone's got any questions and stuff and it's a few members of the group actually here at the Serum Futures Conference which is great. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you Ian. So now it's almost time for us to get a little break but not before I remind you that during the break you can still look at the poster presentations. Then at 11 o'clock we will have the parallel sessions and once again there will be students in white t-shirts out there that can guide you to the right room but the food, water, energy nexus will be at F 112, salinity adapted cultivation strategies in F 129 and then there is interactions between soil, roots and microbial communities in S 110. In the program it says something else but it's S 110. And then at one we'll have some lunch and we'll get back here at two o'clock for the plenary sessions. So let's stretch our legs and get some caffeine shots.
 Good morning everyone. Welcome back to the second day of the Sailline Futures Conference.  There will probably be a few more people coming in. Do please take a seat. But we're just going  to start because we have some wonderful speakers lined up for you. I hope that after yesterday  your osmotic stress levels are still in order. My name is Margo and I have the pleasure of  being your chair today. And as I said, we have a full programme ahead so I'm not going to  take much more of your time right now. So among other things, he has been a professor  in plant physiology at the University of Adelaide at a school that would be very much to my  liking I suppose, the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine. He was also a professor of  bioscience for nearly seven years at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology  in Saudi Arabia. But he's currently on a sabbatical from there to be the head of the food sector  at NEON, which is a futuristic, high-tech, sustainable city of the future. And we're  going to learn a little bit more about that. The strength in his research programme has  been on the integration of cell biology and whole plant physiology. And I'm very much looking  forward to hearing him speak on NEON but also on the genetic characterization of salinity  traits to increase salinity tolerance in crops. So please welcome Mark Tester.  Thank you very much and it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation to give  this talk. That's me? Yep, perfect. So the context of research from my perspective is  that you can you put this up on the screen as well. At the moment there's another talk  on the screen. Thanks. It's that about a third of the world's food is produced under  irrigation by the estimates and that, right, and that about half of the water used for  irrigation comes from groundwater and every aquifer that is being used to contribute to  that one third of the world's food production is being measurably depleted. Some of them  critically so, such as the one under the Punjab in northwestern India, northeastern Pakistan.  So a lot of our food production is actually being, is unsustainable, doesn't matter, I'll  walk over, I've got legs. Does that work? I know it's... Okay, so anyway, we're mining  our water and a lot of our food production is unsustainable and so what we need to do  is see if we can access other sources of water and as a speaker said yesterday, you all know  probably better than me that most of the water in the world is salty, saline and we're able  to... This isn't working. Okay, all right, here we go. So it would be great if we were  able to develop technologies, approaches to unlock water that we cannot currently use  to help feed the world. So if we're going to unlock something, we need a key and of  course there are many keys to helping unlock salt water but one of those is trying to  improve the ability of plants, crops to be grown on that saline water and so one of the  keys for improving these crops is to use genetics, to improve the genetic composition of the  plants to improve their ability to grow in saline water and we can now turbo charge genetics  so there's a different context to the 60s, 70s, previous attempts to improve salinity  tolerance of crops and that is that we now have genomics and so just as our medicine  is facing a revolution, so too is agriculture and so this gives us when you combine it with  the huge power now of phenotyping using computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning  and so on, we're able to really improve, have lots of opportunities for serious alterations  of some of our crops and gives us opportunities to unlock wild germ plasm and we can unlock  wild germ plasm to do two things, we can improve the salinity tolerance of crops like we heard  with the potatoes yesterday and we can also, as we also heard in various talks yesterday,  improve for human use crops that are already highly salt tolerant, we can try to domesticate  highly salt tolerant crops and both those approaches have validity, both are sort of  given examples here in the pictures where we're improving, we're trying to tap into  the salinity tolerance of the wild tomato relatives and there we're trying to domesticate  quinoa.  Alright, so that's an example of some work that we've published quite a few years ago  now where we're improving the, or trying to improve the salinity tolerance of the pasta  wheat in this example, which is pretty salt sensitive, it's missing the D genome which  has a gene on it which is responsible for keeping sodium out or reduces the amount of  sodium accumulation in the chute, that D genome is missing and in fact the corresponding,  the homoeologous gene for that sodium exclusion that you see on the D genome is actually missing  on the A and B genomes that happened to have been grabbed if you like for domestication  ten thousand years ago when the first allotetroploidization of those two grasses occurred to make pasta  wheat and so a breeder accidentally was crossing in, well he wasn't accidentally, he was crossing  in in the late 60s some diploid wheat relatives and accidentally introgressed into that from  one of those wild relatives, the gene that was missing from the tetraploid durum wheat  and that greatly reduced the sodium accumulation, greatly increases the salinity tolerance at  least in saline conditions.  So that's one example of how we can have a go at increasing salinity tolerance of existing  crops that's using sodium exclusion but there are many many other traits that contribute  to salinity tolerance in our crops and for example here this PhD student Nadia, one of  my five Saudi female PhD students by the way, have to rewire your brains a little bit when  you're thinking about a lot of these countries.  Nadia did some fantastic work with rice looking at the ability or differences in the ability  of rice plants to maintain some of their agronomically important traits in saline conditions relative  to non-saline conditions.  So the ability in this case to maintain transpiration use efficiency, so the production of biomass  for the given amount of water transpired and that gets reduced when you add salt, the transpiration  use efficiency, but the extent of that reduction is genetically variable and it's controlled  by a locus that she found in the rice which is goes straight to a gene which is very helpfully  annotated as protein kinase of unknown function.  So that's the type of work that we're now starting to try to do more of in my laboratory.  But of course we can also get salt tolerant plants and make them more domesticated and  improve their use and this is why I started doing some work with quinoa and in this other  example where we're doing work not as advanced as our quinoa work but I really want to accelerate  to our work on the genetics of salicornia which can grow in straight seawall.  Quinoa is pretty good, can sort of go in half seawater and give a reasonable yield but salicornia  is amazing, can grow really well in full seawater and that's important.  So if we could domesticate salicornia that'd be wonderful, we're working to domesticate  quinoa, it's got massive yield potential, massive productivity opportunities, we can  get several tons per hectare, this is in the Tibetan Plateau in southwestern China but  really it does have I think a huge opportunity in marginal lands where it really is very,  very tough in low rainfall environments and in saline soils in this particular example,  it's not an irrigated system.  This is in central Bolivia where I was on a commune where the leader of the commune  said to me we have nothing else but quinoa, that's all they can grow.  So that's pretty good testament for the toughness of quinoa and here it is growing on the, right  on the shores of the world's biggest salt lake, the Saladi Uni in southern Bolivia.  I was there in April taking that photo.  So our program is to try to understand some of the traits that can improve, domesticate  quinoa, make it a more stable crop with greater yield stability in particular, traits like  early vigor, dwarfing, branching and so on, day length and sensitivity, heat tolerance,  that's one problem with quinoa, it's not so heat tolerant.  So there's genetic variation in all of this and so we're developing a pretty big genetics  program where we've got, it's ended up about, to be honest, it's ended up about a thousand  lines of quinoa that we've completely resequenced.  So we've done a gold standard sequence of the genome and then we've resequenced over  a thousand lines of quinoa and then, and the quinoa by the way comes from zero degrees  to 42 degrees south in latitude and it goes up to 4,000 meters in altitude and we're trying  to do quantitative genetics in the field for traits that are contributing to domestication.  We've got this now in field trials across the world and some of these are smaller field  trials, some are less successful, some are very, very difficult like here in northwestern  Argentina but we do still have several sites and I'm pointing to the two sites in China  and the site in northern Australia, really fantastic collaborators and fantastic work  going on in collaboration with them.  They're starting to try to develop indices, measures for various traits, for example day  length and sensitivity.  You can grow the plants under short days and under long days and the difference in height  in the long day and short day is going to be a reflection of, because it has an indeterminate  panicle development.  So the longer the panicle is developing, the taller the plant is that's reflecting the  sensitivity to short days.  It's a facultative short day plant.  So that's one measure that we're developing for trying to, you know, with thousands of  plants do rapid genetics on the domestication traits.  We're doing the same with tomato by the way as well.  With wild tomato, saline and pimper nephrolium which is a, got a tidy little genome, it's  a tidy little plant and so we're able to relatively rapidly do some genetics of this.  We grow them in the field and this talk yesterday mentioned the importance of field trials,  I couldn't agree more with that statement.  So we're trying to do all of our genetics in the field or as much as possible in the  field.  And so here we're using drones to fly over our sites where we're growing the plants under  low and high salinity.  You can see with your eyes the treatments and then try to develop using machine learning  algorithms for predicting biomass and for trying to get quantitative traits that are  correlating with yield.  And then look at the genetics of those traits that the machine learning algorithms have  developed themselves.  We're also doing this in Arabidopsis, so this works very well advanced with another one  of my Saudi female PhD students, Mariam.  And so here she's got about 144 traits in Arabidopsis.  That's like a practice run for our field work with the saline and pimper nephrolium.  And the problem with all of these approaches is that you end up with massive data sets  and massive amounts of data that are really hard to handle.  And the students in my lab, there were four students all doing sort of fairly similar genetics  projects with multiple traits and large data sets.  And they got together with one of my post docs, Magda, and developed this app that they  call MV app, multivariate analysis app.  I really commend it to at least your students.  Many of us in the audience are too old for this, but the students, I'm including myself.  Now this is a fantastic app and I highly recommend it.  It's just, I think it's just come out.  It's just come out in plant physiology, I think literally just in the last month or so.  But the app's been online for a year and we've already had thousands of downloads.  People are using it.  I think it is quite good.  Okay, and it's all open source, so on.  So anyway, this is just a little summary of some of the work that we've been doing.  Yep.  And just my intellectual journey, if you like, for what that's worth without sounding too  pompous.  I started in Cambridge as a physiologist, trained as a classical physiologist.  And I sat there thinking I was smart and I knew the physiological traits were important  for salinity time.  So I wrote a paper 10 years ago where we said, these are the three traits which are important.  And thought I could even guess the genes.  And then I had post docs and students working on specific genes because I thought I could  see those genes in the genome and I thought they're important.  And so I learned quite a long time ago, about 15 years ago, actually a forward genetic approach.  Let the plants tell you what's important, what genes are important, what loci.  You end up with all this informative stuff like protein kinase of unknown function.  But at least you've got a hypothesis then that is worthy of testing because you know  that protein kinase is important because the plants have told you so.  So I then moved from physiology and reverse genetics to taking forward genetic approach  to study physiological traits and that's fine.  But over the last year or so, two years, I've been realizing that we don't even know a lot  of the time what physiological traits are actually contributing to salinity torrents.  And really now, I'm increasingly just, as I've learned more, I've learned that I don't  know lots more.  And I'm letting the computers tell me what traits to measure and I'm letting the plants  tell me what genes are important for determining those traits.  So it's just an interesting little path that I've undertaken.  That's all very well.  We also have to deliver our research.  And I got together with an engineer with whom I was very closely collaborating, a man called  Ryan Leifers.  We published papers on greenhouse cooling and that sort of stuff, salt water agriculture.  And he and I, with my plant science and my salt torrent stuff and his salt water engineering  we got together and formed a company called Red Sea Farms and the first low hanging fruit,  pun intended, that we thought we would try to commercialize with salt water cooled greenhouses  where we're growing salt tolerant tomatoes in the greenhouse on diluted sea water or  brackish ground water.  In the greenhouse that's cooled using sea water, that's actually got three patents to  cover that technology, we had to have three inventions to get it to really work and we  have a roof which is cleaned with no water which we did in collaboration with another  company that was developing waterless cleaning of solar panels.  So we picked up their technology and adapted it for the greenhouse.  And so we end up with a system where depending on the temperature and humidity up to 95%  of the fresh water that would normally be used in a normal greenhouse is substituted  with sea water.  And that's pretty good.  So we raised funding to build a 2000 square meter greenhouse where we're testing, improving  our technology and also showing that the technology works to potential customers and potential  investors.  So that's the company and in the future we're aiming to then of course move that out into  other systems in the field and not just tomatoes of course.  So that was, I was happy doing that and then four months ago I was asked to join this project  called NEON and people are interested in this project so I thought I'd give you a few slides  about it and introduce you to NEON because it is a pretty interesting project, it's  what they call a GIGA project, well that's worth which has got half a trillion dollars  of finance which is then deployed into 16 sectors to build a new city, build a new society.  And the idea is for this to be a sustainable, high tech city of the future.  And it's in the far north-eastern, northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia on the border with  Jordan and Egypt, this is Sinai and it's actually more than just a city, it's about 25,000 square  kilometres about the size of Belgium or the size of Massachusetts for the Americans in  the audience and you can even see it now marked on the plain maps, it's actually being indicated  as a country, it may actually end up with its own independent constitution and actually  be a free standing entity, a free standing country in the future.  The point is that on that 25,000 square kilometres there are 7,000 people and basically nothing.  So it's got a lot of opportunities to build something that is pretty fresh.  The 16 sectors are summarised here, it's all fair, I mean some of it's questionable but  most of it's fairly reasonable and obvious, you need energy, you need water, you need  transport, you need health and wellbeing, you need education, you need food.  And I'm the head of the food sector there.  And the food sector our job is to build a food system where you have the research, the  growth, the distribution and the consumption and this system has to be secure, which means  the food has to be available and accessible, it has to be safe and healthy and we have  to be doing it not just for us but for the future, it has to also be sustainable.  And sustainability is one of the issues that really is a huge challenge for what we are  doing.  We're all in the food sector in this business most of us and arguably we're actually in  a sector which is the most damaging, environmentally most damaging sector on the planet.  We use half the land that humans need, we use over two thirds of the water that humans  use and our sector is also responsible, it's the second biggest emitter of carbon dioxide  or carbon dioxide equivalents, primarily through methane emissions from cattle and rice paddies.  So we're an extremely damaging sector and we need to be actually doing more of what  we're doing, we have to increase food production quite significantly.  Furthermore we're unbelievably wasteful and about 30% of the food that we produce from  harvest on to consumption is either lost or wasted and that is preventable in almost  all cases.  The other dimension where we fall very, very short is a food system, it's with human health  and we know, you know, obesity now is a bigger killer than undernourishment, more people  go to bed fat than hungry and of course hidden hunger, it's way swamps all the other issues,  the world's biggest health problem by a mile that gets pretty close to zero press and really  doesn't get enough attention from us people as well personally.  So there's huge malnutrition which has massive economic costs because of insufficient ingestion  of vitamin A, iron, zinc, iodine.  Okay, but don't despair, we also have lots of opportunities to try to address these  problems and try to improve in particular, well both the sustainability and the health  of the food sector and I see much opportunities with digital technologies and biotechnologies,  digital technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, biotechnologies with genomics  and phenotype in which in turn is supported by the digital sector and I do see we have  lots of opportunities to improve the security of our food production systems, improve the  health of the food that we produce and also reduce the loss and waste that really is unforgivably  enormous in our system.  So at NEON my job is to try to build a food sector and I'm focusing primarily on the sustainability  of the food sector.  I'm actually an optimist in terms of the food production that we have to deliver to the  planet by 2050 but I am not optimistic about the true environmental sustainability of what  we're doing and that's my primary concern and so I want to try to build a food, the  world's most sustainable food system, it's in a pretty tricky spot as well up in the  Northwest of Saudi Arabia.  So what we're going to do is produce as much locally as makes sense, as makes sense economically  and environmentally and we're going to try to leverage our various benefits of NEON such  as the low disease load in that isolated environment and also the fact that we've got a clean slate  regularly so we can develop regulation which is biotech friendly and supportive of innovation  and our local production is going to be riding off the work of the energy and water sectors  where all the energy at NEON is going to be zero carbon emissions, it's going to be all  solar and wind power and the storage will be based because it's of economies of scale,  it will be based on hydrogen, you don't need Elon Musk's silly batteries and the water  is all going to be from desalination, we're not going to use groundwater and because the  aquifers are not discharged in that region but we are able to develop systems for water  desalination which is coming from carbon free emissions and we'll have zero liquid discharge,  okay so we'll have zero liquid discharge from the water because they're going to mine the  brine and extract minerals from the brine so that enables us to build a local production  system which is very sustainable, uniquely so but that still means we can only produce  about one third of the total food that humans need, we're never going to grow the wheat  there, we're never going to grow rice in this area, it makes zero sense to do that but what  we want to do instead is import what we can from sources that are as sustainable as possible  and for that we need to have traceability, we need to know where the food has come from  so we need to have these blockchain based food tracing systems and we need to have good  quantitative scientifically driven measures of sustainability, I don't want this organic  stuff I'm sorry, I know a lot of you in the room are organic and do organic farming and  so on but to me organic was a fantastic concept from the 70s primarily, 60s and 70s which  really lost its way in a big way and has really become overtaken by marketing and by human  emotions and has lost the scientific quantitative drivers that are really true measures of sustainability  and I think this is something that we really need to be looking at ourselves much more  carefully, I want to develop a system which is what I call beyond organic where we're  going to be looking at measures of sustainability that are not, these are the words from the  organic legislation, traditional, natural, ecological, I want to do things which are  quantitative and scientifically driven and transparent to producers, distributors and  consumers, okay I better stop but that's the system that we're going to end up building,  it's the framework for the system where we're able to generate about 70% of our local fruit  and vegetables and seafood but much less of the staples and the dairy so then we have  to have sustainable sourcing of imported food and then we try to generate a whole pile  of innovations to improve what we're doing so we're going to do the best we can and  then develop and adopt technologies to make what we're doing better, alright of interest  to perhaps many of you in this room we're going to set up a research fund as well which  will be completely international competition where we're going to have projects funded,  competitively funded but focused on very, very specific areas which, that's going to  be a moving feast but the idea is that's my list to start with and then that's open for  criticism comments, let's make it better to focus on trying to develop technologies and  deliver technologies to improve the sustainability of the system given the context of NEOM where  it's very hot and very dry so I'd like to thank my group, my wonderful research group  in Saudi, I'd like to thank you for listening and I'd just like to advertise the fact that  we're recruiting.  Thank you very much.  Thank you so much.  Thank you Mark.  So I think we have room for a few questions.  I have this device that I can throw or maybe I can get some help.  This is a microphone so is there anyone with a question for Mark over there?  We could throw that.  And you have to speak into the black thingy.  In the beginning you talked about your genetics and also genomic, how far are you going in  this plant physiology?  Are you sequencing the whole genome?  Are you using caste techniques to remove pieces of DNA and to set in new pieces of  DNA?  Most of the modifications of DNA and the crops that we're generating is from natural  variations so it's usually using traditional breeding which I say is turbocharged with  the genomics so we're able to select the seedling stage for example rather than going  through and refiner typing the plants.  So it's genomic accelerated breeding.  Okay.  No GM, I'm a realist.  Any more questions?  Over there?  Would you like to give it a go?  Oh good throw.  My question was you said that you were critical about the farming practices that we have had  over the past several years and you mentioned that the indicators of sustainable farming  as we have today in organic crops and stuff are not sufficient.  And since you're starting things from scratch, do you have certain indicators in mind that  you would like to see on crops being imported into new?  Yeah that's an excellent question and out there at the moment there's a huge area of  academic work on sustainability, on measures of sustainability.  There are only two companies to my knowledge that are making even a partial adoption of  sustainability measures.  One of them is Mars, is my cocoa sustainably sourced or not and another one is Unilever  interestingly given they're responsible for so much rainforest destruction.  But anyway the area is and by the way there's no city that has sustainable sourcing of food  all right, some schools, some local councils, there are people trying to do it.  Milan, the city of Milan is probably one of the most advanced and they wrote a report  and that was published two years ago but to my knowledge there's been no action on that  report.  So one of the first things I'm going to be doing during next year is actually having  an academic conference.  I'm going to try to bring together as many of these different people who know heats more  than me about measures of sustainability and see if we can start to smash some of this  together.  But as I say 400 different measures that we could count so far with the I mean relatively  amateur auditing of the field.  So to non-answer.  I see another question over there.  Yes?  Yes?  guest currently  Yeah, that's a perfectly excellent. Yeah. Okay. So the question is, I mean, I've lived  in the region quite a long time now. I mean, not as long as you. Yeah, inside Saudi Arabia,  my perspective is actually, it's got a long way to go as a country, but it is changing  very, very rapidly. And it's changing in the right direction, as I say, to cynical Americans.  The country's changing rapidly as well, but not I think the way we want. And that's an  important part of the answer to your question. I think there's a bigger political will. So  I said in my slide introducing Neon, I said it's got financial and political backing.  And this is really, really important. And I think a lot of the projects come and go,  because I think the rather overblown egos of some of the many of the leaders in the  region find that some mega project gets established, but it's established by an 80 year old man  who then dies three years later. And then the project dies with him before it had time  to really get traction. And the next leader comes along and says, well, I'm not interested  in that. That's got my uncle's name on it. I want something with my name on it. And the  great thing about Saudi Arabia, an advantage of Saudi Arabia in these big projects is that  the leader who's pet project, this is his number one project, he's only 32. So it's  quite likely that he's going to be around for a very, very long time. And so that means  there's a lot of political buy into that project. So I think the prospects for any of those  ego driven, well, politically driven, perhaps I should say, projects is more rosy than it  is for most of those previous ones. I think it is a different context for Neon.  Oh, I beg your pardon. Sorry. Ah, right. Okay. Okay. Yep. Yep. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.  Yes. Yes. Yes. Want to be successful here. Yeah. Okay. Okay, great. Okay. So I think  there's two steps to try to answer your question. I think Neon is going to be something which  is going to develop, let's say it develops, it's successful. Then I would expect that  the structures and innovations that are in Neon will, if you like, invade back into the  body of Saudi Arabia and will reform Saudi Arabia. So I think a lot of the reform in  Saudi can be internal, of course, but a lot of the reform has to be from an external,  if you like, reinvasion back into the kingdom from Neon. I'm probably speaking very much  politically out of turn here. But even if the legislations and innovations in Neon can't  go directly, like they can go directly back into the kingdom, I'm sure that they can go  indirectly by way of example to benefit Jordan, Egypt as the immediate neighbors and perhaps  beyond as well. I mean, I'm a bit out of my depths to be honest with you, but I think  when people see something that's successful, they analyze why is that successful? That's  because we've reformed the constitution and we've got a different set of regulations and  structures. Maybe we should be doing some of that as well. So I would hope that it could  form an example. I use the word exemplar for the region. But fingers crossed, who knows?  Thank you, Mark. I think this is all we have time for, but if you have any more questions  about his research or Neon, do ask him in the break. So thank you. So we've zoomed in a  little bit on the... We've zoomed in a little bit on the genetics and on Neon, but now we're  going to move towards something else with a man who has been specializing in saline  agriculture for about 19 years. He's got a PhD in saline agriculture from the Free University  of Amsterdam and he's been working on a practical approach to identify salt tolerant crops on  the Isle of Tessel and he's been implementing this in countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan  and Kenya and it gives him great satisfaction to see usable results here in the Netherlands  and also in the countries that I just mentioned. But I guess the question is, can saline agriculture  contribute in a sustainable and profitable way? So let's hear it from Ariane de Vos.  Thank you for the introduction, Marko. Good morning everybody. Just one second to come  up with the presentation. Yeah, that's the last slide. That's a bit quick. Can you help  me? Sorry. No.  Yes, thanks. So, yeah, the last few years we heard more and more that we have to live  with salinity and we couldn't agree more. That's Marko said. We've been working on this subject  for a long time already. Much more from a practical point of view. So we do a lot of applied  science and really to try to make the difference in the field to help the farmers with adaptive  farming systems and to increase the yields under saline conditions. So that's really  our driving force to help farmers increase their yields in the field. I will show in  the presentation how we're doing that with the applied science here in the Netherlands,  but also the implementation we're doing in different countries. But as also Mark said,  we have to do it in a sustainable way, of course. We have to salt tolerant crops, but  there are many issues with saline agriculture. If you want to put it into practice and especially  if you want to do the upscaling, you have to focus on sustainability. And of course also  it has to be profitable for farmers or else even the best innovation will not succeed,  of course. Sorry.  Oh, sorry. That's not easy. Sorry. So the potential is there. If you look at what saline  agriculture can contribute to the world, now there are millions and millions of hectares  of salt affected land. There are millions of farmers who are affected by salinity.  There are vast amounts of saline water that you can use for irrigation. And if you can  use that water, it's going to make a huge difference with the water stress in the world.  If you can restore salt affected farmland, make it productive again, we can stop deforestation.  It's all great claims, of course, but does it actually work in practice? That's our main  challenge that we are working on. But for sure, the potential is there. So the question  is, does it work? And a lot of people, they're working on salt tolerant crops. And that's  of course the starting point. There's no saline agriculture without the salt tolerant crop.  But we cannot forget about the soil and the water, of course. I think it was already mentioned  a few times in the conference, but there are a lot of issues with soil, especially heavy  clay soil and salinity, of course. What about the water? How can you use it for irrigation?  There are a lot of issues with the soil structure and the soil fertility, of course. And if  we don't address that, then it doesn't work in practice. And also, you have to be very  practical because it's farmers who actually grow the food, of course. You can develop  a salt tolerant crop, but if it doesn't reach the farmers and if they don't adopt these  crops and varieties, there is no saline agriculture, of course. And now we have a very practical  approach on that. For farmers, usually it's seeing is believing, so you have to be active  in the field, set up good demos, show to them that it's easy to do more or less, that it's  reliable, stuff like that. And of course, if you have salt tolerant seeds, it has to  become available for the farmers. If you only have a handful of seeds, we're not going to  change the world, of course. So these are all very important aspects. And of course,  the market value, as I said, it has to be profitable for the farmers as well. And it  takes a lot of policy as well and capacity building. And that's still only the starting  point because the next challenge, of course, is that if you have good demos, if you have  good pilots, how do you do the upscaling? How do you turn millions of hectares of farmland  into saline agriculture? And that's a difficult question with a complex solution, of course.  But I can show you how we're working on that. So first of all, there's the classification  of salinity for soil, of course. And this is a classification based on the threshold  and slope model from Maas and Hofmann. So then you have, of course, the sensitive crops  that are already affected by really low salinities. And now you have all these different classes.  And now this is taken from the old FAO classification. And in that paper, it says that the yields  are unacceptable if you have more or less a salinity level of 10 or 11 desicciments in  your soil. But we heard a lot of stories already that there are many crops out there who can  survive much higher salinity levels. So why is still this more or less the international  standard? So that was one of the questions we had when we were working on the applied  science. And I'll show that in a minute. But it's also our approach that normally we start  with measuring the salinity of a specific location. And we're looking for crops that  match the salinity level. So that's really your adaptation. It's not trying to lower  the salinity of the soil because you want to grow this specific crop, but it's really  adapt to the present salinity levels. So this is in yesterday's session Gerrit von  Strahten, who is still here. He presented our work on an improved methodology to define  crop salt tolerance. And because the classical way is to say there's this maximum salinity  level that you can still have 100% yield. And what is often also used is that at what  salinity level do you still have 50% yield? But if you go to a farmer and say you can  still have 50% yield, I can guarantee you that he's not interested because with only  half your yield, it will never work for a farmer, of course. And the other thing is  that it's difficult to get uniform results. If you look at the literature, you get results  from same crops with big range in salinity tolerances. And why is that? So we were really  working on that with all the data we collected here in the Netherlands at our test field  on Tesla. That's part of the excursion tomorrow. So in short, this paper evaluated all the  results and it evaluated also this system of the threshold and slope model. And in short,  what appears to be a much more robust alternative is what we call the EC90. So that's not the  point where you have 100% yield, but the salinity level that you still have 90% yield. And that's  much more consistent and robust than this 100% level. And it's also a good starting point  to get more consistent results from year to year. And that's another paper that especially  Gerritus is working on because a soil tolerant crop has to be consistent from year to year  as well. You have to have some predictability in what a crop can do under the actual field  conditions of course. And this method helps with that as well. So what we are applying  now is a little bit different classification. So we say don't focus on the 100% yield but  to the 90% yield. And also we often focus on the salinity level that you still have  75% yield because in many cases there's still a viable business model for the farmers with  25% yield reduction, especially if you also have a crop with a high yield potential. Because  you can have a soil tolerant crop, but if the yield potential is low, you know, yeah,  you're not convincing farmers. So you really need this combination of soil tolerance and  high yielding. And sometimes a high yielding variety is better than a soil tolerant variety  because yeah, farmers just looking at how many tons per hectare am I harvesting. And  if you look at this classification, officially, if you really want to talk about a soil tolerant  crop, you know, you still need to have optimal growth around eight days of seeding, you know,  with this class. And at higher salinity levels, of course, we hear a lot about the quinoa  and the salicornia in the presentation, you know, and also beets, you know, they're quite  tolerant. So for sure, there are plenty of crops that you can grow above this 12 and,  you know, even see water salinity, of course. But yeah, for us, it's also important to to  help farmers. And often they like the crops that they know with good market potential,  of course. And that's an extra challenge of the HelloFights. You know, the often the business  model, the market, it has to be developed hand in hand with the whole breeding process.  Because if there's a small market, then you also have only a few farmers that you can  help, of course. So how do we find these soil tolerant crops? Well, I think the image of  our test facility on the island of Tesla has been shown before. So we do a lot of applied  research here. Normally, we start with with large scale screening trials. So then we use  only two salt concentrations. And for instance, for a project in Bangladesh, I will show a  few slides in a minute. Now the farmer preference was really about the brassica crops. So they  like the cabbage and they like the cauliflower and the kohlrabi, you know, crops like that.  Yeah, and we just try to get as many different varieties as possible and test it under these  controlled field conditions. Because up until now, we always see that if you plant many different  varieties of a single crop, you always find some varieties that are more salt tolerant.  So we're not breeding for salt tolerance, but there are already some varieties out there  who have a higher natural level of salt tolerance. So we go from for instance, from 100 different  varieties to only five or 10 based on the selection trials. And know that the top five  that we determine the exact level of salt tolerance at the open air lab. So here we can  irrigate with seven different salinity levels with the maximum of eight repetitions. And  it's it's great work. It's fantastic science. But we mostly do it because we use it as a  reference from for the salt tolerance. And then we determine we use it as a reference  for when we go to other locations, you know, to, to make the comparison, you know, what  about your yield potential and yield gap that we can improve the cultivation under the local  conditions. So these are some examples. So a lot of the data has been published in this  report. It's on our website. That's data up until 2015. In all the years on Tesla, we've  tested about 50 different crops and 800 different varieties. So we got a good idea of which  crops and which varieties work well. Here are two examples from potato and carrot. And  for instance, this potato, I was talking about this EC 90. If you look at the FAO data,  they say your 90% yield should be about 2.5 deci-seamins. So that should be somewhere around  here. But you see with this potato variety, you know, we still get good results around  eight deci-seamins. And the same is true for for carrot. Officially, it's listed as a salt  sensitive crop, which is quite strange because the wild carrot is a coastal plant, you know,  I have no idea why they think it's a salt sensitive crop. But indeed, with the research  we've been doing, you know, this, the yield potential at moderate salinity levels is very  good. And of course, this is just one year data. And we're working now on combining several  years of data into one image, one number for salt tolerance. And but no, we already see  that only with selection, we can get much further than than a lot of people think. So  all nice and well controlled field conditions in the Netherlands. But does it also work in  other countries, in other climate zones with different temperature, day length, you know,  soil type. So that was our next challenge, of course. And yeah, one of the issues you  have to take into account, of course, is your soil structure. Just a quick illustration  about that. You know, normally your soil has a nice open structure, but with salinity,  you can get really compact, you know, water logging, just an illustration we use in the  trainings. And if you don't take care of this, you know, the effect of this on your crop  growth and your crop yield can be bigger than the actual salinity. And the same is true  for water, you know, if you don't have any water, you don't have any agriculture, you  know, so we often join our forces with the water companies like Acacia Water and Nectara,  who help us to develop really sustainable water systems to do the rainwater harvesting  and come up with smart solutions to really use all the water resources in a sustainable  way. And also, you know, just your soil preparation, this is just a quick image that we're using  also in Bangladesh. You know, just if you have raised beds, you know, that your salinity  accumulates in a different way than if you just have full field conditions. Now, so with  these raised beds, we can more or less steer that the salinity accumulates a little bit  in between the plants and the plant itself in the root zone, the salinity is a bit lower.  Yeah, you get much better results. And in the end, in Bangladesh, the monsoon comes and  then this soil accumulation is leads down again. So on a yearly basis, it's a sustainable  system for sure. So all these little tricks combined, you know, we've been implementing  it in different countries. We started in Pakistan. So these are all the different potato varieties  that we've tested in the Netherlands. So we went with six potato varieties to Pakistan.  So we don't say this is the salt tolerant potato, because you can never predict if the  winner on Tesla was also the winner in another climate zone. And you clearly see for instance  that this plot, you know, yeah, the yield is nothing. And it had to do with sea dormancy.  We found out it's not salt tolerance. But that's the detail, you know, that variety  didn't match the local climatic conditions. But you do see these other varieties performing  well. So we have these demo plots. We have lead farmers who are implementing this on  the first level. And from there on, we wanted to do the upscaling. But we also found out  that the local salinity measures, the analysis were a bit different than what we are used  to. So they took samples from this plot, and they called it low salinity. But we took our  own samples with our tool kit. And yeah, it was like sea water salinity. So there was  a very big difference. And two weeks later, we got this image. Well, that's not suitable  for potato production. I can assure you that. And also, you know, these water logging conditions,  you often see that in the field. You have a big variation in the field. So this is one  potato variety with bear patches. And you have good growth. You know, you see that in  one field. So you have to tackle all these problems. And in the end, we succeeded because  this is a part of Pakistan where they said it's too hot. It's too salty. Farmers don't  know how to grow potato. But we got very good yields on that. Even better than the national  average under freshwater conditions. And the salinity level was close to this eighth again.  So what we also saw in in Pakistan is that it's more or less moderate salinity, but  big issues with with the yields in the field. So just speed it up a little bit. Looking  at the time, this is a project and it's going to be in a session this afternoon presented  by about bruining. But this isn't a project we did in Kenya. So this is one of the carrots  varieties that we selected and identified. And this is the local variety. And together  with the soil and water management, we already reached a 94% yield increase in in year one.  And we saved almost all the groundwater extractions with this water management as of all. We also  did a training in Egypt. So we always do very applied training. So we are also indoor explaining  the theory, but putting it into practice is really important. So we're training the staff  of the university and the students to become extension officers. And they also go to the  farmers. And one of our biggest projects is in Bangladesh. So here you see the coastal  area of Bangladesh. And just quickly to see it's over a million hectares of salt affected  by the drought. But the majority 44% is in this range of now between four and 12. So it's  only moderate salinity conditions. But still, the farmers, they only grow one crop per year  in this coastal area during the monsoon. They have rice, then there's plenty of fresh water.  And in other parts of the country, they have two crop seasons more in the year. But here  they don't even plant during the dry season because of the salinity issues and the water  issues. But the majority of the land is only moderately saline. So what we did is we're  building their local test facility where we can do the validation trials from the other  the crops and varieties that we found in the Netherlands. So we're making these local cultivation  strategies with the fertilizer, working on new types of irrigation. But we're also using  it for training and capacity building. And we're also testing the summer crops because  the summer crops, you know, they have to be heat tolerant as well. And we can't test that  in the Netherlands, of course. So we're doing a lot of training and research, but also a  lot of training of the lead farmers. So we have 200 lead farmers. So we are training  the trainers. The trainers are training the lead farmers and the lead farmers are training  the local farmers. So combined, we are training 5000 farmers already. And now here you see  this raised beds. We do the crop rotation. And we're introducing six different crops  now. And I'll talk more about this in the session I have this afternoon. But for sure,  there's a good business model for these farmers in Bangladesh. So what I also wanted to say  is, you know, we also see now that, you know, the crops and varieties and the strategies  we've developed in the Netherlands, they also work for these smallholder farmers in different  parts of the world. But yeah, it's great that we have these results. But you know, how can  we make sure we have upscaling, you know, and how can you have the real impact or the real  big impact? So that's for sure the next challenge. And yeah, it's only text because yeah, we  don't have any pictures yet of the real upscaling with millions and millions of hectares, of  course. But no, these are the approaches that we're working on. Now, and this is more for  the regional approach, you know, you have to do the salinity assessments and, you know,  come up with the good adaptation programs for sure. And it has to be again, affordable  and profitable, especially for the smallholder farmers that are often faced with salinity.  No, so now that's all the innovations we're working on. And I think on a larger scale,  you know, we have to put saline agriculture for sure more and more on the international  agenda. I think there's a lot of attention for it. And also a conference like this, it  can really help to put together all the knowledge in all the different areas of the world because  there's a lot going on. But it's, yeah, I think it can be coordinated better or at least  inform the rest of the world even better, you know, not only through scientific papers.  You need the adaptation plans for sure. And in the end, again, you know, you have to help  the farmers, you know, you have to do this training and capacity building, make sure  that the seeds are available and also make breeding for salt tolerance, you know, for  the breeders themselves. We have a lot of contact with them. But yeah, they always say,  yeah, but none of our customers ask for salt tolerant seeds. And the farmer said, yeah,  but there's no breeder who can offer me salt tolerant varieties. So this is a little bit  of chicken and egg story, you know, yeah, if nobody is asking for it, nobody will develop  it. And if nobody is developing it, yeah, nobody is asking for it, of course. So that's  for sure a challenge that needs to be addressed further. And also, yeah, of course, we need  the policy. Now, for instance, in Bangladesh, the import for drip irrigation is so high,  you know, that it's, you know, the tech, the taxes for import, you know, that it's not affordable  for smallholder farmers, just because yeah, there's this standard import tax, you know,  and if you cut those tax, it can be affordable for the farmers, you know, just, yeah, there's  more or less small details, but they're really important. And also, yeah, one of our ambitions  is to have a whole network of research and training centers all over the world, different  climate zones, good interaction between the research centers, you know, to really help  each other to develop the soil tolerant crops, but also that the cultivation strategy and  the market. And again, you know, this market potential, it has to be there, or else farmers  and the whole agro value chain, you know, they will not be mobilized, you know, so don't  forget about that. So in summary, where I started with, but I'm also going to end with  it. So we believe we really need a more uniform way to measure soil salinity, but also to  determine crop soil tolerance. For sure, there are already crops that can be used, and we  can put it into practice today already. But yeah, you need further breeding as well, of  course. But again, saline agriculture is also a multidisciplinary approach, you know, don't  only focus on the crop, you have to look at the soil and the water as well for sure. And  yeah, the upscaling is really the next challenge, you know, and for sure, we're going to need  a lot of cooperation with that. And you know, let's let's do that. No, I think a conference  like this is a good, good start. A lot of knowledge is here. And if we put everything  into practice, I think we're going to have a much bigger impact than we have today. Thank  you. Thank you. I think maybe we started a little bit later, but I'm trying to catch  up on time a little so you can get a nice break. But maybe we can take one question.  Is there anyone who wants to ask a question? Yeah, over there. And the microphone is quite  close. So thank you. Thank you for the presentation. It was really interesting. You mentioned your  training program a couple of times, and I'm really interested in the program. You described  going from trainers to lead farmers to farmers in the field. But I was wondering is there  some kind of quality control and the different steps of training? And does it also include,  for instance, like some kind of feedback loop so that you also capture the experience from  the farmers in the field doing the tests and doing the work? Yeah, it's part of the training  that there's this evaluation moment and all the trainees can fill in the evaluation form.  So that's one way that we get feedback. And for us, the most important feedback is to  also see the results in the field because we always do very practical training. So we  are really in the field with the farmers or at demo sites. And getting those results in,  that's very important for us to see if the farmers are enthusiastic, if they want to  do the upscaling in the next season. And if a farmer says, next year I'm going to do  my whole field in this way, then we know we get good feedback for sure. Okay, thank you  very much. So then we're moving on to which is more of an announcement as I have understood.  We have Ian Gould from the University of Lincoln to tell us a little bit more about  the EIP focus group. So I'll just hand you this microphone. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.  Oh, yes. I know that it's allocated 15 minutes, but I'll be a lot quicker so you can all  get your coffee break. The last thing you want is another Brit asking for an extension  on things. So we'll, it's that one there. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. I just click. Yep.  Okay. Fantastic. Thank you. Okay. So, yeah, my name is Ian. I'm from University of Lincoln.  I'm also part of the Salfa team. And I'm just giving a very, very quick sort of promotion  or just let you know about a working group that some members of this group are actually  part of, which the EIP Agri focus group on soil salinization. So what it is really is  the EIP Agri group have compiled 20 experts from across Europe, or with expertise in soil  salinity and that could come from sort of from groundwater or from irrigation. We've  got people who work in glass houses, people who work on farm and trials and stuff like  that from around Europe. We can see here that soil salinization is a huge problem in Europe,  quite a lot of focus in the south. But also you can see here there's also instances in  northern Europe and particularly in the continental European land as well where sort of geological  salts are causing a problem for soils. So what this focus group does is it's got, it's  basically two sessions. We have a meeting, we've had a meeting in May and we've discussed  a range of topics which focus on where are the areas affected, identify good practice  that's going on throughout Europe, exploring opportunities of adding market value to any  maybe potentially saline products, potential of other crops we are not using at the moment  but maybe more niche crops that are saline tolerant. And other stuff, so soil remediation  is one of the topics discussed and addressing where there are gaps in our knowledge, where  there's a need for knowledge across Europe. So what we've done is we had a meeting in  September in May and then we've gone away, we've got lots of different working groups  and we meet again in October and summarized, we've all done some homework and we're all  exploring the issues in our own countries and around those themes. We all meet again  in October in Spain and after that we'll put together a final report which will be accessible  on the EIP Agri website and it's kind of a knowledge sharing platform, there's people  from industry and from the scientific community and the idea is just to compile what we've  found out and let it be accessible to all. So everyone will be able to access that when  it's put out. So this is basically a very quick plug to say this is going on and it  will be really good when it's finalized if people would like to access that and I'll  be around at the coffee breaks to if anyone's got any questions and stuff and it's a few  members of the group actually here at the Serum Futures Conference which is great. Okay,  thank you very much.  Thank you Ian. So now it's almost time for us to get a little break but not before I  remind you that during the break you can still look at the poster presentations. Then at  11 o'clock we will have the parallel sessions and once again there will be students in white  t-shirts out there that can guide you to the right room but the food, water, energy nexus  will be at F 112, salinity adapted cultivation strategies in F 129 and then there is interactions  between soil, roots and microbial communities in S 110. In the program it says something  else but it's S 110. And then at one we'll have some lunch and we'll get back here at  two o'clock for the plenary sessions. So let's stretch our legs and get some caffeine  shots.
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