The Rawdat Al Faras agricultural research site has been provided with 1,200 palm trees for dedicated research on this native fruit plant.
The research station has five agricultural research fields, out of them three farms are working for two decades conducting extensive agricultural research. Recently two new dedicated palm tree research farms have been added to the station, an official at the ministry of Municipality and Environment said.
The station also includes a farm for seedlings, and a centre for selling imported seedlings, in addition to providing seedlings of fodder plants for farms which have successfully implemented water-conservation irrigation systems.
It also provides agricultural guidelines to private farms in all the fields. The participants of 11th meeting of the technical and steering committee for the development of sustainable date palm production systems in GCC countries visited the station yesterday and appreciated the research efforts conducted by the station.
The station was established in 1976 and located at North on the space of 517 acres. In addition to palm tree research, the station also conducts research on other plants and fodder.
It also has a place for cooling and storing dry dates and fruits, in addition to 24 agricultural farms. The station participates in the activities conducted by the inistry. It recently participated in the Date Festival 2016 at Souq Waqif and offered seedlings at a very low price to citizens.
One seedling is sold for QR85 while the market cost is between QR230 and QR250. A citizen was allowed to purchase a maximum of five seedlings.
Varieties of palm trees such as Khalas, Khanizi, Barhi, Guar, Khasab among others are there in the farms.
The technical and steering committee recently held a meeting here that was attended by experts and representatives from Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and the International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).
