by Chanaral, Chile (Reuters) -In Chile’s dry Atacama, the driest desert in the world, growers and researchers try to use water from the sky themselves to grow lettuce and lemons, using a network to catch droplets of fog.
“We grow hydropulture lettuce completely with fog water in the driest desert on the planet,” Orlando Rojas, president of the Atacama Fog Catchers Association, to Reuters near Chanaral in the Atacama, where some areas see no rainfall for years.
“We have had other crops that have not yielded any results, and that is why we have had the tendency to do SLA.”
Researchers from the UC Atacama Desert Center are launching an open-access webmapping platform to show the location of the areas with potential for harvesting fog water in the country and try to open these dry areas for cultivation.
“We know the potential of it and we know that it can be an option and a solution for different scales of water needs in different areas where there is a significant water scarcity,” says Camilo del Rio, director of the UC Atacama Desert Center.
In the midst of bare rocky hills and dry, white sand, the system works with the help of a mesh that is suspended between two posts that intercepts the small amount of moisture in the air, so that it is collected in drops and stored in water tanks.
“We are able to collect 1,000 to 1400 liters of water in these inhospitable places, where we are clearly not through nature in other ways,” said Rojas in a region where lemon trees also grew from the collected water.
“We have the potential for life, what this water source is. Once we have heard about this project, we have not stopped because it is vital for human existence.”
Mario Segovia, also from the Misting Group, said that the water collected from moisture in the air was pure.
“The harvest does not look bad, it is a super healthy food, pure nutrients that are organic,” he said. “They are in a state of water with nutrients, because this fog-catcher water is completely neutral, it has no minerals, no chlorine, nothing.”
(Reporting by Rodrigo Gutierrez; Writing by Adam Jourdan; Editing by Nia Williams)
