Agriculture

The Kingdom Grew Its Farms by Deciding What Not to Grow

Saudi agriculture is producing more food than at any point in its history. The more revealing story is what it stopped producing, and where those crops went instead.

Ameer Albahouth

14 Oct 2026 • 6 min read

A surplus built on an absence

By the official count, Saudi Arabia produces more dairy than it consumes. The General Authority for Statistics puts self-sufficiency in dairy products at 131% for 2024, alongside dates at 121% and table eggs at 103%. For a country with scarce rainfall and no permanent rivers, those are remarkable figures.

They become more interesting when placed next to another fact. Since November 2018, large farms in the Kingdom have been barred from growing green fodder, including alfalfa, the protein-rich feed that dairy herds depend on. Almarai, the country's largest dairy producer, told the market it would source all of its alfalfa from outside the Kingdom by the start of 2019, drawing on the United States, Argentina, Spain, and Eastern Europe.

The milk is Saudi. Much of what the cows eat is not.

That small contradiction is the most useful way into the growth of Saudi farming. The sector is larger than ever, and it is also more deliberate about what it refuses to grow. Both things are true, and the second may matter more than the first.

The numbers on the table

The headline figures are strong. According to the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture, total agricultural and food production exceeded 16 million tons in 2024, and the sector contributed about SAR 118.1 billion ($31.5 billion) to GDP. Ali Al-Zahrani, who leads implementation of the National Agriculture Strategy at the ministry, said at the Saudi Agriculture Exhibition in October 2025 that agricultural GDP had grown at a compound annual rate above 7% over five years.

Underneath that total, the picture is uneven. The ministry reports vegetable output above 3.5 million tons with 78% self-sufficiency, and fruit output, including dates, above 2.9 million tons at 64%. Statistics authority data show poultry at 72% and red meat at 62%. Quarterly agricultural GDP reached about SAR 31.9 billion in the third quarter of 2025, the highest on record in the statistics authority series. Even so, agriculture remains a small part of a large economy, roughly 2.5% of GDP in 2024 according to World Bank data.

Read quickly, these are numbers about growth. Read slowly, they are numbers about choices.

A history of learning the price of water

The Kingdom has tried the opposite approach before. In the 1980s and 1990s, generous support turned the desert into a wheat producer. Wheat output climbed from about 150,000 tonnes to roughly four million by the 1990s, according to an analysis by food security researcher Martin Keulertz, and the surplus was exported. The water came from ancient aquifers that do not refill on any human timescale.

The policy reversal was gradual and, at times, uncertain. A 2008 decision set out to phase out domestic wheat by 2016. A virtual ban followed, then support was partly reintroduced in 2018, in part because wheat uses far less water than alfalfa. After the war in Ukraine unsettled global grain markets, domestic wheat rose again to about 1.2 million tonnes, while imports covered roughly three quarters of national needs in 2022, according to the same analysis.

Fodder was the larger question. When the ban took effect, ministry figures reported by Argaam estimated that green fodder crops consumed about 17 billion cubic meters of water a year, and that the ban would save around 9 billion. That is roughly half of the water the crop had been using. The ministry now says efficient irrigation has cut non-renewable water use in farming by 52% compared with 2016.

The growth of the past decade, in other words, came after a decision to grow less of the thirstiest things.

Where the fields went instead

A ban on growing alfalfa did not end the demand for it. It moved the field.

The ministry's own phase-out plan listed fodder cultivation abroad, for export back to the Kingdom, among the options it encouraged growers to pursue. Almarai invested about $500 million in its agricultural companies between 2014 and 2018 for this purpose, according to an EFG Hermes note at the time. Its farms in the American Southwest became the most visible result.

They also became the most contested. In October 2023, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs announced that the state was terminating a lease held by Fondomonte Arizona, an Almarai subsidiary, in Butler Valley, and would not renew three others. Her office said an investigation had found the company in breach of lease terms. Fondomonte said it would appeal and that it would demonstrate its compliance. [INSERT: current status of the appeal and of Fondomonte's remaining Arizona operations, confirmed with Almarai and the Arizona State Land Department]

The episode illustrates an idea economists call virtual water: the water embedded in goods that cross borders. A self-sufficiency ratio counts the finished product. It does not count the feed, or the aquifer, upstream. When the Kingdom imports fodder, it is also importing the water used to grow it, and with that water come other people's politics, droughts, and elections.

None of this makes the dairy figures misleading. It makes them specific. They measure the capacity to process and produce at home, which is a real form of resilience. They do not measure independence from the outside world, and no farming system in a desert can.

The crop that was already here

If the fodder story is about relocating thirst, the date story is about leaning into what the land already did well.

Saudi Arabia led the world in date exports by value for the fourth consecutive year in 2025, with shipments worth SAR 1.938 billion, according to International Trade Centre data reported by the Saudi Press Agency. That was about 14% higher than in 2024. The National Centre for Palms and Dates says the Kingdom has more than 37 million palm trees, production above 1.9 million tons, and buyers in more than 125 countries.

There is a quiet irony in this. The most confident export in Saudi agriculture is not a product of the modern push to grow everything. It is a crop with centuries of local knowledge behind it, recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage in 2019. Growth here looks less like conquest and more like refinement: better grading, better packaging, better access to foreign retail shelves.

[INSERT: on-record interview with a grower or farm operator, ideally in Al-Qassim or Al-Ahsa, on how the fodder ban or the shift to protected agriculture changed what they plant and why]

The questions the totals hide

The gaps in the data point to where the next tensions sit. Poultry and red meat are the categories furthest from full self-sufficiency, and both depend heavily on feed. Raising those ratios means more birds and more animals, which means more feed, which in turn means either more imports or more pressure on water at home. The ministry has pointed investors toward intensive livestock, aquaculture, and large-scale poultry. How the feed equation is solved will shape whether those ambitions add resilience or simply relocate dependence.

There is also the question of measurement itself. A single ratio for each product is easy to report and hard to interpret. It says how much is produced against how much is consumed. It says little about which inputs came from where, or what each cubic meter of water bought.

A different definition of strength

For decades, agricultural success in the Kingdom was imagined as abundance: green circles in the sand, wheat exported to the world, proof that the desert could be made to yield. The more recent record suggests a different idea. Some of the most consequential agricultural decisions of the past decade were refusals: to keep subsidizing water-hungry grain, to stop growing alfalfa at scale, to let other countries' fields carry part of the load.

That approach has costs, and Arizona showed that importing water can also mean importing controversy. But it reframes the question of what growth in a desert should mean. Perhaps the measure of a mature farming sector is not how much it can produce at home, but how clearly it can decide what each scarce liter is for.

Sources

Calculation note: The statement that the fodder ban saved "roughly half" of the crop's water is Arabian Growth's own calculation, dividing the ministry's estimated 9 billion cubic meters saved by the 17 billion cubic meters consumed (about 53%), as reported by Argaam in 2018. All self-sufficiency ratios and production figures are as published by the General Authority for Statistics and the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture and have not been independently verified.