A Turkish high schooler grew 500 apricot trees on bone-dry land using a power-plant byproduct

What Happened

17-year-old Ayşe Umay Bahçıvan used leonardite — a lignite-derived soil conditioner known for its water-retention and moisture-absorption properties — to bring a 70-year-fallow, water-source-free plateau in Kahramanmaraş back into cultivation, growing 500 Malatya apricot trees to a 4-ton yield without irrigation. The project was turned into an academic paper with university research support and won first place nationally in Turkey's High School Students Climate Change Project Competition.

Why It Matters

Leonardite is normally sold as a soil amendment for its water-retention properties, but using it as the sole intervention to make a 1,950m, water-source-free plateau cultivable is a genuinely novel application — most drought-agriculture solutions rely on drip irrigation infrastructure, not a single soil additive.

No irrigation, no water source — just a power-plant byproduct and five years of patience.

FET's Takeaway

What makes this more than a heartwarming local story is the follow-through: turning a student project into a peer-reviewed academic paper with university support is what actually makes the method reproducible elsewhere, rather than a one-off anecdote.