US farm with 93,000 hectares for sale: 10,000 cattle on 2 islands.
10,000 cattle, deer, bison, and a slaughterhouse in the middle of nowhere. One of the largest slaughterhouses in Alaska is located on the storm-battered Umnak Island.
Arabian and Chinese corporations are collecting data from their XXL mega farms and focusing on smart cultivation - who benefits from this.
The multinational agrochemical corporation Syngenta and the Arabian agricultural holding Al Dahra are now strategically working together. Syngenta, based in Switzerland and the USA, is owned by ChemChina and thus majority-owned by the Chinese state. For this collaboration, the corporation offers its management platform Cropwise for smart farming.
Global XXL mega farms: Arabian and Chinese corporations are farming smart
The agricultural holding Al Dahra, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), claims to cultivate over 400,000 hectares of irrigated farmland in Egypt, Romania, Serbia, the USA, and other countries. Its smart XXL mega operations on six continents with approximately 3,500 employees and 16 processing plants globally trade with nearly 3 million tons of food and 3 million tons of animal feed. The new partnership to implement the digital farm management system on more than 220,000 hectares in Romania, Serbia, Egypt, and Morocco aims to centralize the data of the farms. Various tools, such as sensors, drones, and data analysis, assist the agricultural holding in smart farming.
Why Arabian sheikhs are investing in smart farming
Cropwise by Syngenta is a digital platform with modules or digital tools for agronomic, financial, and administrative farm management, similar to Xarvio by BASF or FieldView by Bayer. Real-time data should enable farm managers to quickly combat newly emerging pests or diseases, improve water consumption and irrigation efficiency, and optimize the use of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, diesel, and other resources. Better connectivity of machinery and equipment in the agricultural sector is expected to contribute over $500 billion to the global gross domestic product by the end of the decade, according to Syngenta and consulting firm McKinsey.
The 4 purposes served by the digital tools of XXL mega farms
1.) Monitor and analyze fields - Monitor plant health and harvest condition in real-time via satellite, analyze vegetation indices and detect diseases and pests early, use hyper-local weather forecasts, and capture and analyze soil data.
2.) Manage agriculture sustainably - Integrate data from satellites, machinery, weather, irrigation, and sensors, predict yields and interpret patterns, analyze complex data, provide decision support for the use of pesticides and fertilizers, plan fields and farms seasonally, analyze field trials, and save water.
3.) Optimize resources - Manage stocks, track production costs, adhere to best practices, manage machine fleets including maintenance, repairs, fuel consumption, calculate with variable interest rates, and optimize documentation processes.
4.) Connect machines and equipment - Connect with John Deere Operations Center, Trimble, or Claas compatible devices, automatically transfer data from field devices to the platform, monitor equipment status in real-time including performance optimization, and monitor indicators of soil health.