Desert Fishing: How BGU is Helping Build A Negev Industry
September 28, 2012 When the idea of fish farming in the desert
came up about 25 years ago, it sounded like a joke, recalls
Prof. Samuel Appelbaum, who heads the Bengis Center for Desert
Aquaculture at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert
Research (BIDR). “We were the first to realize that the brackish
water beneath the desert could be used for agriculture,
aquaculture and a combination of the two,” he recounts. During
the past few decades, Appelbaum and his BGU colleagues have
pioneered the farming of fish, shrimp and crustaceans in the
Negev alongside horticulture specialists developing agricultural
crops. The results draw increasing attention from the rest of
the world as more drylands materialize and the threat of world
hunger rises. Similar farming techniques are now used in arid
lands as far flung as Arizona, India and Australia. Fish ponds
at Kibbutz Mashabei Sade in the Negev, just north of Sede Boqer
In the Negev, the process builds on the