Ag in the Middle East

On a vacation, NRCS spokesperson Mindy Rambo went on kind of an agritourism trip to the Middle East. My sojourn into the Middle East was absolutely fabulous, loved seeing 2000 year old history and being exposed to all of that. But what was even more fun was seeing how they do agriculture in Egypt and Jordan. One of the things that was really interesting about Jordan was as we were driving through, and it's a largely desert country. But every so often there would be a wind farm and next to it, a pivot where they were growing wheat. And then next to that there would be a vineyard and an olive orchard. And I thought the AG here looks a lot like Idaho, which I did not expect given that when I was in Egypt, because 80 percent of the population lives and farms along the Nile River that they are still using very small scale farms in Egypt, most of them under 50 acres and all flood irrigated. But interestingly enough, I think of it as north because we went upriver. But in southern Egypt, above the high dam, which formed Lake Nasser, they have a huge desert reclamation project going on. They have a 50 mile long canal, looks like a California aqueduct, drawing water from Lake Nasser to irrigate areas where they are attempting to reclaim the Sahara Desert. Speaker1: Naive me, given the desert climate, I thought Egypt would import all of their food. The big resource? The Nile River.