Keeping the desert blooming

In Israel's Sea of Galilee the water level is falling. This troubled country basks - or bakes - in the sun for an average of 300 days a year. Many of those days are spent by politicians and policy-makers debating ways to obtain the 400 million cubic metres of water needed every year to meet demand in the agricultural, industrial and urban sectors. A number of water cutting measures recently introduced by the government outlaw irrigating and watering public and private gardens during the day and ban car washing with a hose.

credit Netafim

But Israeli farmers are expert in extracting high yields from their parched land, and water conservation in agriculture and floriculture have been a mandate of Israel's agronomic sector ever since the first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, promised in 1948 that the new state would make the desert bloom. Indeed, most of the country's flowers (40 %) are grown in the southern arid region which averages a mere 25 mm of rainfall a year. And although agriculture products now account for less than 4% of total exports - compared to 30% in the 1960s - Israel ranks second only to Holland in European flower sales.

Farmers of Kibbutz Hatzerim developed one of Israel's best-known and most successful methods for growing plants in arid climates in 1965. Israel's low rainfall, the dry desert soil and high levels of salinity made traditional irrigation methods ineffective. But agronomists at Hatzerim created a system by which small quantities of water delivered to the root system were used to their maximum efficiency. Drip irrigation became the mainstay of Israeli agriculture and rapidly spread abroad. By 1995, over 20 billion drippers were in use worldwide. The drip systems now developed by Netafim are exported to more than 80 countries, and its products and expertise have been adopted by, among others, Argentina, Malawi, China, Kazakhistan and the EU.

Israeli agronomists are currently working on a huge number of water conserving ideas, many of them employing very high technologies, for example to monitor water levels in plants, or to operate irrigation systems that recycle drainage and run-off water. A simpler idea is the collection of rainwater from the roofs of glasshouses. It is estimated that from 3,500 hectares of hot houses, of which 1,500 hectares are designated for flowers, the water could be siphoned into a reservoir and repumped into the system. However, the country's most practical solution for the water crisis facing agriculture and urban users is desalination by reverse osmosis. A number of facilities are in the prebuilding stages along Israel's Mediterranean coastline. Water, which is pumped in from the desalination, will be mixed with tap water further reducing the saline content.

Another approach has been the search for plants that can survive the harsh conditions. For 20 years botanist Sima Kagan has been on a personal mission as she has watched Israel's best agricultural land sold off to make room for more housing and roads. She says the country's policy of expanding urbanization to accommodate the growing population is also destroying the ecological balance, and there is barren land now where orange groves used to be. "If we don't look for plants that thrive in a minimum of water, all our landscape will offer us is asphalt, rocks and thorns." She wonders what has happened to the bees and other creatures who depended on the citrus blossoms for their survival.

credit: Sima Kagan

For two decades her crusade at the Volcani Center for Agricultural Research in Bet Dagan has been to find the survivors; those plants and flowers, indigenous and otherwise which provide shade and blossom while demanding little from the soil in which they are rooted. "Its not enough that the plant carries out photosynthesis. It needs to justify its existence with some flowers and foliage." She points to varieties of Oleander and Pistacia Lentiscus as good examples of flowering plants now adorning Israel's local scenery.

Kagan searches the region and the world for ornamental plants that acclimatize to the harsh Israeli conditions. She and other botanists are particularly looking for those plants which are dormant during the summer, and are thereby enabled to survive the worst of the drought. The seeds she brings back are quarantined and then propagated in experimental plots; they are then studied for their level of adaptability to the heavy and poor soil, the high salinity and pH contents. "A lot of plants which are drought resistant, don't survive because of the high saline content in the soil in some of the areas of the country," she says.

Recently, the Minister of Infrastructure praised the country's agricultural sector for their co-operation in the effort to reduce water usage. However the flower growers and breeders continue to face a twin challenge: on the one hand they are driven to find new varieties and products which meet the demands of the market, and keep them ahead of the competition. On the other hand they must respond to the demands imposed by a national water shortage that exerts a constant pressure on them to cut back, and threatens the continued blossoming of their multimillion dollar export industry.

Back to Menu