The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

From ENN, signs of the times to come...

Friday, October 03, 2003
By Associated Press


PORT SULPHUR — For the past decade, something eerie's taken place here. The ground is getting saltier and saltier.

Patty Vogt, a sturdy 49-year-old farm owner who's herded cattle and lived off planting oranges all her working life, looks at her citrus trees and sees what an untrained eye doesn't: Death.

"It should be full and green and full of oranges," she says, a few weeks before harvest.

Salt — lots of it — lies three feet underground. Scientists say all the salt is tied to Louisiana's bigger problem: coastal land loss. As the marsh goes, the sea gets closer and the ground gets saltier.

But the hundreds of citrus growers here aren't about to plow their trees under and say goodbye to a 200-year-old tradition. Research scientists are tinkering with salt-tolerant and salt-resistant root stocks. Dwarf trees with shallower roots are in style. Pumping and draining the salt has caught on.

Since Jesuit priests in the 1790s first stuck orange seeds into this "black land," as Vogt and the other folk call the rich alluvial soil on the banks of the Mississippi River south of New Orleans, orange growers have overcome pests, storms, freezes and diseases.

"This is one we might not be able to solve," says Wayne Bourgeois, the main researcher at the Louisiana State University AgCenter Citrus Research Station. "We might not be able to find tried and true solutions. We might just be able to keep our heads above water."

"Last year I had oranges on my trees for the first time in about six years. I hate to get too doggone optimistic about it, but it gives encouragement," said Gerald Ragas, a 70-year-old farmer in Buras, down the road a few miles from Vogt. He's a fan of draining the salt away. Perforated drainage pipe — 1,100 feet of it — runs along the rows of his navel orange trees to keep the water table low and the salt from reaching the roots.

"Citrus needs dry feet," said Alan Vaughn, the AgCenter county agent who talks with citrus farmers up and down this stretch of land, lends his ear to their woes and spreads the word of scientific advances. "These guys are desperate...(Read on in: Faced with encroaching salt water, Louisiana orange growers fight back)