Finland’s iFarm announced a multi-year partnership today with Sadarah Partners to build out a commercial-scale indoor vertical farm in the State of Qatar, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The goal of the partnership is to bring more local food production inside Qatar’s own borders and at the same time produce greens, flowers, and berries year-round.
The Al Sadarah Group owns Qatar-based indoor farming company Agrico Organic Farm, with whom iFarm will work directly on the project. The two entities will build out an indoor vertical farm based on iFarm’s technology, which includes a number of different tools that help automate the maintenance and management of the indoor grow process. This time around, that includes drones, which will be equipped with computer vision and used to monitor crop health and yields. Computer vision can track the size, weight, and health of each crop, and also spot potential diseases and other problems.
The forthcoming farm will be the first farm in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries that uses AI and drone technology to grow food.
The bigger-picture goal here is to make Qatar more self sufficient when it comes to food production. Food security issues in Qatar pre-date the COVID-19 pandemic, as the 2017 Gulf rift halted food supply lines into the country and brought the issue of food security into the forefront. Since then, Qatar has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into food self sufficiency.
However, cultivating crops in the country is difficult because of Qatar’s hot temperatures, lack of rainwater, and desert climate. Fertile soil is also limited. Those factors make the country and prime candidate for more indoor, controlled-environment farming. The iFarm-Agrico partnership is also part of the hugely ambitious goal to reach 70 percent self-sufficiency in food production by 2023.
iFarm and Agrico will start with strawberries and leafy greens on their farm, as well as some edible flowers. For iFarm, the partnership is one of many it has around Europe and the Middle East.
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