Climate Change: New Challenges and New Opportunities
To some extent there is a taboo connected to saline farming - either where salinization is not seen as a genuine urgent challenge or the concept of saline farming is dismissed as undesirable. Due to this, SalFar works on raising awareness by supporting saline farming through the engagement of stakeholders at local level, including farmers, crop developers, retailers, water and agricultural policy workers.
In connection with awareness raising activities, Olof Olsson, from the partner organisation University of Lund, has been in close contact with a significant stakeholder in Sweden, namely Lantmännen. Lantmännen is an agricultural cooperative and Northern Europe’s leader in agriculture, machinery, bioenergy and food products. Lantmännen is owned by 25,000 farmers and with grain at the heart of their operations, they refine arable land resources to make farming thrive.
Olof Olsson has presented the SalFar project to Mats Larsson, F&U Director of Lantmännen and some of his colleagues. According to Olof, Lantmännen realizes that salinity and drought will be major issues to deal with in future agriculture, also in Sweden. As a result, they will therefore be following the SalFar project with great interest. However, presently they feel that it is too early for Lantmännen to take a more active role in the project. Instead they look forward to more data on how climate change sea level rise and various form of salinization of farmland will affect Swedish agriculture and Olof Olsson will make sure to keep Lantmännen informed about the progress of SalFar.
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