California's severe drought is putting stress on everyone these days: the residents whose wells are running dry; the farmers forced to experiment with growing their produce with much less water; and of course, the thirsty fruits and vegetables themselves.
But preliminary research suggests the dryness isn't hurting the produce's nutritional value, and with a few added minerals may even boost it.
That's the tantalizing concept Tiziana Centofanti has been studying at the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in Parlier, Calif., a sprawling campus of experimental farmland about half an hour south of Fresno.
Centofanti is a research scientist affiliated with the Center for Irrigation Technology at Fresno State. One of the questions she's asking is how fruit trees react to drought, compared to fruit from trees that get plenty of water.
"My research is about physiological response to stresses," Centofanti says, "and drought is one of those."
Some of the pomegranate trees in the orchards at Parlier are pretty stressed out. They're planted inside a tile ring that constrains their root systems, forcing them to burrow deep into the ground. Centofanti waters them with a solution of salt, boron and selenium; these are natural elements in the soil on many Central Valley farms that are also struggling with drought.
"You will definitely see that these trees are much, much smaller," she says. They're actually dwarfish, and the fruit on them is tiny, too.
Centofanti shows me another plot of pomegranates she's watering with just 35 percent of what a tree normally would drink, and yet another group of trees that are getting half the normal amount of water. These trees all are growing to the usual height but their fruit is cracked, so you can see the pomegranate seeds peeking out like tiny rubies.
Research shows that pomegranates have specific compounds that may reduce swelling and infection, even possibly fight DNA damage and cardiovascular disease. So to see how drought might change that fruit chemistry, Centofanti takes the water-stressed pomegranates into the lab, cuts them and uses a French press to squeeze everything, including the peel, into juice. She shakes that onto a magnetic stirrer, and analyzes it with liquid chromatography.
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