Soil erosion
Growing up in the Southwest United States you get to learn a little bit about salinization of soil through the use of evaporative coolers to cool your house. When the water in your evaporative cooler evaporates it leaves behind calcium and salt buildups which corrode the metal of the cooler. You can fight this very effectively by using an additional pump to drain all of the water from the cooler every 12 hours, but that leads to salt buildup in the soil if you pump it onto the ground which most people do including me. The area that you pump the water onto eventually dies and nothing grows back until you either stop draining water there or use oodles of water to wash the salts further down.
Salinization for the purposes of this assignment is caused by farmers irrigating land for many years and the water evaporating and leaching down leaves salt behind to build up. Salinization leads to soil erosion because of the lack of ground cover because most crops won’t grow in soil that is too high in salt content. According to Miller Jr. Salinization is a major problem because it (Miller, Jr., 2005, 283) “It stunts crop growth, lowers crop yields, and eventually kills plants and ruins the land.” The good news is that simply by growing more salt tolerant crops the land already affected can still be useful, or by frequent crop rotation and less irrigation you can prevent land from becoming barren unfertile and eroded.