Crisp, Crunchy peanuts
…right here in the Kingdom, at a farm in Hail
Riyadh Daily 27 November 2006

The Golden Grass,Inc. Farm in Hail, which is the only farm in the Kingdom to produce peanuts, is also the largest oil seeds producing farm in the Middle East. This year it has nutted nearly 7,000 metric tons of these ground nuts on an area of 1,020 hectares

The farm which has been successfully cultivating a rotation of crops is the brainchild of a Saudi agricultural engineer, Turki Faisal Al Rasheed who has graduated in the field from a US University. The management has ambitious plans to expand its wings by producing peanut butter and preparing roasted, salted and blanched peanuts in the coming years.

According to Eng. Rasheed, his company which was establish in 1982, started planting groundnuts in 1988 with the income it received from wheat and barley cultivation. This year, he said, the farm was able to produce a better yield than the previous years due to conducive climatic conditions and also due to the untiring efforts of the farmers. He said that the work in the barn is being carried out with the most advanced machinery found in the world. He has even erected a warehouse in Riyadh which is capable of maintaining 25 degrees centigrade during the summer when the outside temperature would be above 50 degrees centigrade.

The workforce of the farm comprises nearly 500 expatriates who hail from India, Philippines, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

A group of journalist visited the farm last weekend. The manner in which a driving peanut cultivation was being carried on that desert soil was amazing. The farm manager Khadim Khalil pointed out that the climatic conditions and the sandy soil in the Hail region was ideally suited for groundnut cultivation.

The interesting part in the cultivation of peanuts is that when the seeds are harvested, the cultivated soil is ready to take in another cereal to be sown on the same land. The peanut cultivation produces nitrogen phosphorus in the soil and it increases the moisture capacity of the earth. On the whole, peanut cultivation produces a number of organic material which is conducive for another rotation crop.

Peanut is a summer crop which is harvested within 100 to 150 days from the time of sowing. Seedlings are watered regularly with the help of center pivots which covers a circular are of four hectares each. It draws its water automatically from a 700-meter deep tube well which is found in several points in the farm to supply water to the pivots for irrigating the fields.

The matured groundnuts are reaped with the help of a digger shaker which extricates the grown plants with the groundnuts on its roots and drops it on the surface. Then the "Peanut Combine" a machine which is expected to take the nuts, picks up the rooted plants and swallow the nuts and throws away the plants. The nuts are taken to the factory by the Combine, where they are separated from the stones and dust with the help of a dryer. Subsequently, the nuts are shelled, cleaned and packed in thick paper bags for sale. Each bag contains 20 kilograms of shelled peanuts.

Workers are sent to the harvested field to pick up the nuts that were left behind by the machines. As an incentive for these workers they are compensated with extra payments for the labor done to pick up the left overs. The workers are paid one riyal for every kilo of nuts picked.

According to Khalil 80% of the produce is exported to countries such as Jordan, Bahrain, Australia, United Kingdom, Holland, Gemany, Spain and France. Negotiations, he said are going on for the export of nuts to be sent to South Africa and the United States.

Asked about the price of peanuts, he said that it fluctuates according to the production rate in peanut cultivating countries. He pointed out that India is the largest producer of peanuts in the world, but the yield is consume locally by way of peanut oil whereas the United States production of peanuts is exported to other countries in the form of roasted nuts and peanut butter. Where there is a crop failure in these countries, the price of peanuts tends to rise upto $1,500 per metric ton.

At present, the nuts are sold at $1000 per metric ton, he added.