If farming is difficult to picture in the desert, a booming dairy farm challenges the imagination even more. Yet more than 29,000 head of cattle are raised at Al-Safi farm in Saudi Arabia. The Al-Safi farm comprises 14 square miles in the Al Sahba Valley, some 60 miles southeast of Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia. Al-Safi enjoys international recognition from the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest integrated dairy farm in the world. All the dairy's operations, including 29,000 head of cattle, production of feed, milking parlors, processing and packaging plants, and the distribution system, are on-site at the Al-Safi farm. All basic feeds needed by the herd -- such as alfalfa, Rhodes grass hay and sorghum Sudani silage -- are grown on the farm.
Al Safi dairy began as an ambitious, seemingly impossible project -- importing cows and locally producing milk rather than importing it. Notwithstanding arid desert realities, temperatures in the Kingdom can drop to freezing in the winter and soar to 115 degrees F in the summer.