Desert Blooming : Saudis: A Revolution in Farming

As the airliner banks for a landing at this ancient trading center, the Saudi desert seems to smother life all the way to the horizon.

The plane passes over mile after relentless mile of scorched scrubland, a bleak mosaic of brown and red sand. Then a huge green disc passes underneath, as verdant as a Palm Springs putting green. Suddenly they are everywhere, circles of green freckling the landscape.

These odd-looking shapes are wheat fields, made possible by a combination of oil drilling technology and Sun Belt farming techniques imported from the United States. Thanks to its vast hoard of petrodollars and some inspired planning, Saudi Arabia has quietly made its deserts bloom, defying nature and becoming a major agricultural power.

Dramatic Production Rise

Only four years ago, the country produced just 4,000 tons of wheat and imported heavily from the United States. Last year, Saudi farmers harvested a staggering 1.3 million tons of wheat, and Saudi Arabia became an exporter of food.

“This country has an abundance of sunshine, but it’s still downright unbelievable what these folks are doing out here,” said Weldon Ray Purcell of Quitaque, Tex., the manager of Mutlaq farms outside Buraydah.

Taking a visitor on a tour in his pickup, Purcell proudly showed off the farm’s 44 circular fields, which are known as pivots because of the irrigation method. Each field is 1,000 yards across and is watered by a giant sprinkler that crawls around like the hour hand of a clock.

“Last week, that wheat grew five inches in six days,” Purcell said, his laconic Texas drawl barely concealing his amazement. “But don’t put that in the papers back home cause people will say I’m a liar.”

3 Development Goals

According to Saudi officials and Western agriculture experts, the Saudis had three goals when they embarked on their ambitious agriculture development plans in the late 1970s.

The first was food self-sufficiency. Having seen the effects of their own oil embargo on the West and the U.S. grain embargo against the Soviet Union, the Saudis decided to insulate themselves as much as possible against any similar embargo on food that might be directed against them.

Secondly, Saudi officials were concerned about the population flight taking place from rural areas to the larger cities, particularly among young people. The agriculture boom is creating small cities in outlying areas.

“Four years ago, there were only mud huts here,” said Raqwal Nand, a taxi driver who came here from India at the start of the boom. The city is now dense with skyscrapers, shops and stores.

And lastly, diplomats believe that the Saudis have long yearned to rival the feats of the Israelis, who gained worldwide fame for their farming prowess in the desert.

The cost of the Saudi program has been undeniably staggering. Without huge oil revenues, it is unlikely that anything like this could have been contemplated.

The Saudi government gave farmers free land and paid half the cost of drilling wells and buying equipment. Costs not covered by the grants could be financed by interest-free loans. But the real windfall was in the direct subsidy of wheat prices.

The “landed” price of wheat, or wheat bought commercially and delivered to Saudi Arabia, is about $180 a ton. The Saudi government began paying farmers $978 a ton, about five times the world market price.

This year the subsidy is due to come down to about $560 a ton, still about three times the world price level. The goal, according to government officials, is to compete in the world market.

“The problem in Saudi Arabia is that unless something is very attractive people are reluctant to get involved,” said Mansur Husayn, a farmer near the town of Hail and a former undersecretary of agriculture.

Government Dilemma

“It was a real dilemma for the government. If there hadn’t been incentives, there would be less involvement, but now I think people moved in on too large a scale. The small traditional farmer was left out of the benefits.”

“There’s no question,” added Abdallah T. Dabbagh, the secretary general of the Saudi Chambers of Commerce, “the government created a new class of businessman-farmer who wouldn’t be there but for the subsidies.”

The subsidies have affected the whole range of agriculture, from the dairy farmer, who gets air transportation for his cows paid by the government, to the nomadic herdsman, who gets subsidized barley to feed his animals. But by far the biggest impact of the program has been on wheat production.

“The wheat program was more profitable than anyone could believe,” said Yosif Ali Saheal, the dean of the King Saud University Branch College of Agriculture here. “I know farmers who are making millions of riyals a year.” (The riyal is worth about 27 cents.)

Saheal believes that the cost of central pivot farming is so high that the reduction in subsidy will prevent any new farmers from taking part in it.

“This is exactly what we hoped would happen,” said Hisham Naser, the minister of planning. “We are producing more wheat than we need, so we are cutting back. The whole point of subsidies was to provide incentives until they were no longer needed.”

Small Scale Farming

Traditionally, wheat farming was done on a very small scale in the kingdom’s relatively few areas that had water. High technology, however, brought new expertise to the drilling of oil wells, which often ended up as “failures” because prospectors hit water instead of oil. The water was what is known as fossil water, buried hundreds of feet beneath the surface and thousands of years old.

When these drilling techniques were combined with the central-pivot irrigation method developed in dry areas of the United States, the Saudis for the first time had a practical way to grow crops in the desert.

“It’s like a dream come true,” said Mohammed Mutlaq, a retired army general who was able to turn his family’s small date farm into a 10,000-acre wheat farm virtually overnight.

Mutlaq is typical in many ways of farmers in the area of Buraydah, which is now called Saudi Arabia’s breadbasket. He employs seven American farm managers, six of whom used to worship at the same tiny church at a town in Texas, and 100 farm laborers from the Far East. The only Saudi involvement is at the top, which is common here.

“On the whole, you never find more than a couple of Saudis on the farm,” said Husayn, who employs a farm manager from Fresno. “But Saudis are making all the important decisions.”

For his part, Purcell said he was impressed by the farming know-how of Mutlaq and his son, Marwan, the farm’s general manager and a graduate of Arizona State University.

“Besides, there’s not much of a life farming back in the United States,” Purcell said. “A man could starve to death these days.”