Harvesting Sea Salt

We drove by field after field of water – to my untrained eyes, I thought I was looking at rice fields, after all, they grow rice here and I have seen one or two fields in Japan (smile). It turns out, however, that they were actually salt fields. They pump in water from the nearby ocean, spreading it out into these fields, probably 1.5 feet deep or so. Then begins the long process of waiting for the water to evaporate, add more water, wait some more, add a bit more until there’s roughly a 6 inch layer of salt. Then they pull the salt into small piles to allow yet more water to drain out of it. The resulting salt crystals are finally shoveled into large sacks and sent out to the refinery.