Farming using sea water

Imagine farming using sea water ! But this person is doing exactly that (link). Carl Hodges is growing salicornia, a crop nourished by ocean water that holds the potential to provide food and fuel to millions.
A few miles inland from the Sea of Cortez, amid cracked earth and mesquite and sun-bleached cactus, neat rows of emerald plants are sprouting from the desert floor. The crop is salicornia. It is nourished by seawater flowing from a man-made canal. And if you believe the American who is farming it, this incongruous swath of green has the potential to feed the world, fuel our vehicles and slow global warming.
The Earth's ice sheets are melting fast. Scientists predict that rising seas could swallow some low-lying areas, displacing millions of people. Hodges sees opportunity. Why not divert the flow inland to create wealth and jobs instead of catastrophe? He wants to channel the ocean into man-made "rivers" to nourish commercial aquaculture operations, mangrove forests and crops that produce food and fuel. This greening of desert coastlines, he said, could add millions of acres of productive farmland and sequester vast quantities of carbon dioxide, the primary culprit in global warming. Hodges contends that it could also neutralize sea-level rise, in part by using exhausted freshwater aquifers as gigantic natural storage tanks for ocean water.

Manure Solids Conversion to Insect Biomass

An interesting project (link) to control swine manure by half.

This project employs black soldier fly larvae to digest swine manure, thus reducing the amount of manure by half, reducing nutrients, eliminating house fly breeding, reducing odor and producing a value-added product that may be used as an animal feed ingredient.
The use of fly larvae, or maggots, to digest manure has been widely studied; however, the cost of separating the larvae or pupae from manure residues made systems that use fly larvae to treat manure expensive. The researchers involved in this project have developed a simple system to force black soldier fly prepupae to self-harvest with no external energy requirements, making industrial scale culture on manure practical with this native, non-pest fly. This system can be readily retrofitted to existing swine facilities using the manure handling belt proposed by Gannett Fleming Inc.