This is the largets palm tree plantation IN THE WORLD!
It is located in Al-Qassim region of Saudi Arabia and spreads over a vast 54,000,000 (fifty four MILLION) square meters. That's more than 5000 (fife thousand) hectars. In other words, the size of a city!
It belongs to Saudi Arabian Sheikh Saleh Bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Rajhi, and currently supervised by his son Sulaiman.
The total number of palm trees in this large landscape is 200,000 palm trees that produce 45 different types of Arabian dates, eventhough the well-known types of dates do not exceed 15 in other plantations!
29,000 palm trees of the sum total is organically planted (no chemicals used) and the price for these dates can really skyrocket, if you know what I mean.
What's interesting though is that approximately 40% of the total production of dates goes to charities.
When I met with the agricultural Administration of the project they told me that Sheikh Salih's vision is for the production of this plantation to reach every Saudi house in need, and even outside Saudi Arabia since they recently got the "ECOCERT" certification, which allows them to export to other countries.
This is not All, though! This project is even listed in Guinness World Records as the largest palm tree plantation in the world.
The Agricultural Administration recently issued a book, or rather a guide, on how to handle palm farms projects, which is the result of more than a decade of hard work and experience, allowing farmers to have a better perspective for such projects and solving too many problems concerning this aspect, such as palm trees' parasites, irrigation plans and much more.
Despite the gigantic size of the project, it is not the only one. There several more across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but of course not of the same size.
From another point of view, dates have a very close relationship with the Arabian culture, especially in the Arabian Peninsula. Recent researches indicate that dates are complete meals and contain an extremely high value of nutrients.
It has been mentioned in the Holy Qur'aan , and In the Islamic tradition, Prophet Mohammaed -peace be upon him- had urged upon having seven dates on each morning, as they are good for the health and protect from lots of diseases.
This was taken during my visit to Al-Qassim region.
