Food From the Sun

This reminds me of a science project concept that was floating around my head back in 7th grade.

They appear to have pulled off the ultimate something-from-nothing agricultural feat – using the sun to desalinate seawater for irrigation and to heat and cool greenhouses as required, and thence cheaply grow high-quality, pesticide-free vegetables year-round in commercial quantities.

However, knowing very little about plants and being something of a procrastinator, what started in my head as ‘maybe I could find a way to use the sun to purify salt water and show that the process works by using the water to grow some plants’ ended up as ‘trying unsuccessfully to get soybeans to grow using tap water and hoping that the whole science fair thing would just mercifully come to an end’.