This is Saudi Arabia measuring a massive 2 million square km, making it the 14th
largest country by landmass!
However, 95 percent of the kingdom is a hot dry desert
where you find lots and lots of sand!
It is also one of the few countries where you find
not a single permanent river!
You are also looking at a country where the average
annual rainfall is below 150 mm all year round!
However, if you zoom in on the country, you will see something totally unexpected;
arable land!
Saudi Arabia is dotted by a network of farmlands where agriculture thrives,
letting farmers harvest many kinds of fruits, an abnormality in the hot desert!
You will also immediately notice that most of the
farmlands are in circles!
The nation has 35,000 square kilometers of arable land, which
is larger than the Netherlands and larger than three times the size of Qatar!
However, in the early sixties, Saudi Arabia only had 400 square kilometers of arable
land!
How did the oil-rich kingdom multiply its arable land in so short a period?
Join us in this video as we dive into the ingenious
methods Saudi Arabia has used to turn its desert into a farmland oasis!
Saudi Arabia might harbor lots of dunes of sand but it had not always been that way!
Approximately 10,000 years ago, Arabia saw a significant increase in rainfall and an
expansion of lakes and vegetation which supported human settlements across the
peninsula.
In the millennia that followed, however, a series of extreme droughts led to
drastic ecosystem changes.
Humans would adapt and continue to inhabit the sandy
country.
Evidence shows that during the 'Dark Millennium,' an arid period lasting from
approximately 5,900 to 5,300 years ago during which much of Arabia is thought to have
been uninhabitable, there was human occupation at the Jubbah oasis.
In other areas of northern Arabia, people constructed walls
around oases, built landscape features to capture water runoff, and began excavating
wells.
While water is scarce on the surface, Saudi Arabia sits on reservoirs of water, known
as aquifers.
This is similar to how the kingdom sits above massive amounts of crude oil.
However, Saudi Arabia has been pumping out water from underground for years.
Most of the water has gone to agriculture, where
large-scale irrigation has made planting and harvesting possible!
However, there is one problem with pumping water from below the ground.
Aquifers can run out of water, especially when it supports
large-scale irrigation like Saudi Arabia has been doing.
To conserve its water, Saudi Arabia imported a technology, and it has
made a lot of difference!
The technology is center pivot irrigation!
What is center pivot irrigation and where did it come from?
In 1948, an innovative Nebraska farmer named Frank Zybach developed a new type of
sprinkler system, the center pivot, which he patented in 1952.
Center pivot irrigation involves using a mechanized irrigation system
that can help to irrigate crops by maintaining a circular pattern around a central
pivot.
This actually explains why the farmlands shown at the beginning of this video
are circular.
The major part is a lengthy radial pipe that is supported by sprinkling
towers.
These towers pivot around a center point of the whole mechanism.
The radial pipe itself consists of equally spaced nozzles
to supply water to the surrounding crops.
As the pipe gradually rotates, the water is uniformly released from the nozzles to offer
nutrition to the crops.
By using the radial pipe system of center pivot irrigation, the water travels along
a straight line down the field.
All the nozzles of the pipe have the same flow rate and
cover the same area.
This helps to ensure the uniformity of the water being applied to
the crops!
Center pivot irrigation systems can cover as much as 130 acres in a straight system
and nearly 155 acres in a swing-arm system, depending
on the length of pipe attached.
This makes the system suitable for large-scale
agriculture.
The design of this system is such that the sprinklers located near the pivot tend to
cover a smaller area compared to the nozzles located
at the end of the pivot.
The main components in a center pivot irrigation system include the pivot point, which
the whole mechanism revolves around.
It is the area where the water first enters the
pivot pipes.
It is also the location of another crucial component; the control panel.
The control panel contains the hardware that allows
the farmers to operate the machinery.
This is the brain of the setup, from which the farmer can start and stop the machine,
as well change direction and change modes of
operation, including running dry and running wet.
There are numerous types of control panels available for center pivot
irrigation currently.
Farmers can pick up basic or advanced digital panels based on the
budget and requirement.
Other components include the drive tower or drive unit, which is part of the machinery
that touches the ground, and it contains the accompanying hardware that allows for the
movement of the system.
It usually consists of wheels, a base beam, a drive train, and
other important structural supports.
There is also the tower box which controls the drive
unit, making the whole machinery move in the right direction and for the required
amount of time!
With center pivot irrigation, farmers can easily apply water uniformly all over large
farmland.
It also greatly reduces the amount of labor needed during the harvest season.
This solves two problems; high costs of labor and the inconsistency of farmhands.
This irrigation method also helps to conserve enormous
amounts of energy in the long run.
In addition, it is known to be far more efficient
when it comes to using water.
It helps to prevent water runoff and ensures that the
water bills incurred by farmers are greatly reduced.
Moreover, using this system makes it easier for farmers to manage the water levels in
their soil.
The semi-automatic nature of this mechanism, coupled with the lateral
movement of the sprinklers makes managing water levels easier for farmers.
It is seen that the efficiency of water application in
center pivot irrigation is nearly 80%, and this is
far higher than traditional methods.
A center irrigation system is very versatile because it can water nearly every type of
crop a farmer.
Then the same system can be used to sprinkle fertilizer, pesticides, and
other necessary fluids!
Approximately two-thirds of all irrigated areas in Saudi Arabia use the center pivot
irrigation system.
This has helped turned many acres of land into intensively irrigated
agricultural land.
The government’s support and incentive for farmers to help maintain
the country’s food supply contributed to this shift.
Initially, Saudi Arabian farmers complained of excessive corrosion in lateral piping of
center pivot irrigation systems because they used a variety of water quality standards.
To combat the problem, many farms replaced the lateral high-cost steel pipes with
polyethylene pipes that do not corrode.
Polyethylene laterals, which are equipped with
short drop tubes, were directly positioned under the standard steel pipe and above the
ground surface at 150–200 cm.
Farmers initiated this redesign with information drawn
from their own experience and technicians, without even involving the center pivot
dealers and designers that rely on a predetermined pressure for each sprinkler!
Depending on the water’s salinity, this replacement occurs every 3 to 5 years by the
center pivot irrigation owners.
In 1992, non-renewable groundwater supplies provided about 92 percent of irrigation
water, accounting for more than 85 percent of overall national water use.
As a result, the number of center pivot irrigation systems
rapidly increased in Saudi Arabia.
However, the center pivot irrigation system may be efficient, but it doesn’t actually
solve the problem.
In the real sense, it only postponed the issues!
This rise in irrigated land resulted in a notable increase in the strain
on Saudi Arabia’s water supply, causing problems with the availability!
When intensive modern farming started, there was a staggering 120 cubic miles or 500
cubic kilometers of water beneath the desert, enough to fill Lake Erie in the U.S.
But in recent years, up to 5 cubic miles or 21 cubic
kilometers were being consumed annually on the farms!
Virtually none of it is replaced by the rains because there effectively are
none.
Based on extraction rates detailed in a 2004 paper from the School of Oriental
and African Studies in London, the Saudis were on track to use up at least 96 cubic
miles or 400 cubic kilometers of their aquifers by 2008!
Experts estimate that four-fifths of the Saudis' "fossil" water is now gone!
Saudi Arabia has also witnessed some of its fertile land becoming an arid desert in
modern times.
That was the case in Al Baydha, about 20 miles south of Mecca.
The problem was that the inhabitants, known as
Beduin tribes, were obliged by law to settle in one area, a change that caused overgrazing
and the gradual disappearance of native pasture.
The community chopped trees down for sale as charcoal, and soon, the once-
fertile land was nothing but rocky desert.
Wells had to be dug further down to reach water, as the scant seasonal rains, with nothing
to contain the water on the land, made flash floods that rolled away to the Red Sea
instead of seeping into the soil to replenish reserves.
The government then invited Stanford University permaculturist Neil Spackman and
Harvard University bioethicist and futurist Mona Hamdy to try to reverse the change.
Spackman lived among the inhabitants of Al Baydha from 2010 to 2018.
He built rock terraces and check dams, and opening swales
in the land, which helped in harvesting rainwater.
Packman and Hamdy used the ancient water-conservation methods of
ancient Incans and Nabateans to contain seasonal floods and train the water to flow as
useful streams.
In 2012, the project moved to planting drought-resistant trees and by 2015, Packman
and the Beduin planted ten species of trees, 4000 in all.
Most of the trees died, but enough grew to give reasonable hope for a
green landscape providing foraging for bees and animals, windbreak, seeds from which to
extract oil, charcoal, and soil improvement through fixing of nitrogen.
The project would run into trouble when funding stopped and was abandoned for some
years.
However, when the rain fell again, the trees sprouted again.
Perhaps, one day the success at Al Baydha will be replicated throughout Saudi
Arabia ,and the whole country will blossom with plant life!
Let’s hear what you think of Saudi Arabia creating greenery in the middle of the desert
in the comment section below