Uzbek farmers battle to save cotton, wheat crops from mortal enemy: salt

QARSHI, Uzbekistan -- On an unseasonably mild spring afternoon, second-generation farmer Diyor Juraev gathered a group of worried growers in a wheat field outside Qarshi, a city in southern Uzbekistan.

They came looking for answers from a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) delegation to an existential problem for the country's farmers: After decades of poor irrigation in an arid land, sharply increasing deposits of salt are tainting the soil where they grow wheat and water-intensive cotton, the main Uzbek cash crop.