DESERT WHEAT IN THE UAE ON AN EXPERIMENTAL FARM GROWS UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Pico Agriviet

The farm tests wheat varieties from around the world to select the most resilient for desert farming.

The yellow sands of the Sharjah desert are in sharp contrast to the green shoots in the fields of a pilot farm where a wheat project is underway. Since the United Arab Emirates imports about 90 percent of its food, several large-scale projects have been launched in recent years to grow local crops in arid conditions to improve food security.

The government launched a 400-hectare farm in Mleiha in 2022 that uses desalinated water to irrigate plants, Reuters writes.

“What pushed the wheat farm was supply chain issues in the last couple of years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict,” Khalifa Alteneiji, chairman of the Sharjah Department of Agriculture and Livestock, told Reuters.

The UAE, a federation of seven emirates, imported 1.7 million metric tons of wheat in 2022, with the Sharjah region accounting for 330,000 tons, according to government data. It is expected that the farm in Mleiha will be able to produce about 1,600 tons of wheat per year to begin with. Officials say the energy cost of producing the 18,000 cubic meters of desalinated water needed per day for irrigation will decrease proportionately as the project’s acreage expands. “The cost of this desalinated water and the end product will hopefully be similar to the market price,” Alteneigi told Reuters.

At the same time, pesticides, agrochemical fertilizers and GMO seeds are not used on the farm. There are plans to expand the desert wheat fields to 1,400 hectares by 2025 and eventually to 1,900 hectares. The project now includes two hectares of experimental fields with 35 different varieties of wheat from around the world to study soil and weather compatibility in the Emirates.

Agronomists are assisted by artificial intelligence and a thermal imaging system to collect weather and soil data to regulate irrigation rates and monitor wheat growth. “This is a special agricultural platform that determines the right amount of water for the coming days, based on accurate information, and provides data on crop development,” Ibrahim Ramadan, director of agriculture, told Reuters.
Source: Reuters

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