MENA Water Review · Visual story
Circles in the Sand
A country with almost no rain grew wheat with water from the last ice age, and became one of the world’s ten largest exporters. Then it stopped, and went looking for someone else’s water.
Each circle is a single machine, walking round a pivot.
Astronauts have photographed this corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The images show circles: field after field, with the largest about a kilometre across. These are irrigated fields growing wheat, fruit and vegetables in a basin that receives 100 to 200 millimetres of rain a year. A wheat crop needs 450 to 650 millimetres over its growing season.
The circles are not a design choice. Each is made by a steel arm, about half a kilometre long in the largest fields, mounted on wheeled towers. The arm moves slowly around a central pivot and sprays water as it goes. Wherever it reaches, crops grow. Beyond its reach, the desert resumes.
That leaves an obvious question. The green is real, but the rain is not. The water comes from the Pleistocene.
Where the arm reachesWhere it does not
The kingdom had oil revenue and no water, and spent the first to manufacture the second.
From the outside, this looks like a straightforwardly bad idea. It was not, and not for the reasons usually assumed. In 1973 Saudi Arabia had just demonstrated that a commodity could be used as a weapon, and that food could be used in the same way. A state grain agency had been established in 1972 to hold a six-month wheat reserve. After 1973, oil revenue paid for large farm subsidy schemes.
Farmers received land, interest-free loans and subsidised pumps, but above all they received a guaranteed price. Between 1975 and 1980 the state paid about $1,000 a tonne for wheat, while the world price ranged from $99 to $180. The results came quickly. By the mid-1980s, the kingdom was growing far more wheat than it needed. In 1985 it began selling wheat to several Gulf states.
What a tonne of Saudi wheat was worth, 1975 to 1980
The gap between the two is the subsidy, and it is the whole explanation for what followed. Buy-back subsidies alone are estimated at $15 billion between 1980 and 1994.
From orbit you can watch it happen.
The satellite record is unusually complete because the basin was empty before farming began. In false-colour images, living vegetation appears red. An irrigated field is therefore unmistakable against the surrounding sand.
Empty desert. The basin before the pivots arrived.
The boom, sixteen years in.
Near-total build-out of the basin floor.
The Wadi As-Sirhan basin, north-western Saudi Arabia. Images: Landsat (1984) and ASTER (2000, 2011), NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.
In 1992 a country with no permanent river was the world’s tenth wheat exporter.
In 1985 Saudi Arabia harvested 4.1 million tonnes of wheat and exported about 1.2 million, the tenth-largest volume in the world. This was not tenth in the region, but tenth in the world. A generation of engineers and farmers had taken some of the least promising agricultural land on earth and made it produce more than countries with rain, rivers and centuries of farming practice. The achievement was genuine. So was the bill, which arrived in a currency nobody was counting.
Production climbs from almost nothing in 1980 to more than four million tonnes in 1992.
The kingdom begins selling wheat abroad, to several Gulf states.
The peak: 4.1 million tonnes, and exports among the ten largest in the world.
The government begins cutting its purchases of local wheat by 12.5 per cent a year, to end them by 2016 and save what is left underground.
The state stops buying locally grown wheat and relies on imports. A production quota for small farms followed from 2019.
Saudi wheat production in million tonnes a year, after FAOSTAT. FAOSTAT records 1.3 million tonnes in 2023.
The water under these fields is about twenty thousand years old.
“Fossil water” is a literal description. It is rain that fell on Arabia around the last ice age and remained trapped in deep sand and limestone ever since. Modern rain barely replenishes it. In the Tabuk area, recharge runs at 3 to 10 million cubic metres a year, compared with well over a billion cubic metres pumped in 2004. Every litre lifted is a litre that does not return on any timescale that matters to a government.
Averaged across the world, growing a kilogram of wheat takes about 1,830 litres of water. Irrigated wheat takes about 1,870 litres. Estimates of the amount held by the aquifer system range from 252 to 870 cubic kilometres. One peak year of wheat therefore consumed something like one to three per cent of the entire reserve, and the programme continued in one form or another for three decades.
Water taken from the Tabuk area against water returned
Millions of cubic metres a year. The lower two bars are drawn at their true size against the first, which is the point: recharge is not a small fraction of abstraction, it is a rounding error.
If you cannot grow thirsty fodder in your own desert, you grow it in somebody else’s.
From 2008, the government reduced its wheat purchases from local farmers by 12.5 per cent each year until it bought none at all. There was no drought and no crisis. The most ambitious desert-farming programme ever attempted was switched off with a memo. That decision deserves more credit than it usually receives: very few states voluntarily dismantle a flagship achievement because of a resource problem that lies a generation away.
Then, in November 2018, a ban on growing green fodder took effect. It pushed large farms out of crops such as alfalfa, which needs roughly two to three times as much water in a season as wheat. The cows still had to eat. In 2014, Fondomonte, a subsidiary of the Saudi dairy company Almarai, had already bought nearly 10,000 acres at Vicksburg in La Paz County, Arizona, and was farming leased state land in nearby Butler Valley. The soil was not the attraction. In that part of rural Arizona, groundwater is largely unmetered and unregulated.
Arizona noticed. In October 2023, the state cancelled one of the company’s four leases in Butler Valley and said it would not renew the other three when they expired in February 2024. The company continued pumping in the Ranegras Plain basin, where it is the largest water user. In May 2026, a judge refused to pause the state’s public nuisance case against it.
- 1970s
Food becomes strategy
A state grain agency is set up in 1972 to hold a six-month wheat reserve. After oil revenues jump in 1973, the government launches major farm subsidy schemes.
- late 1970s
Drilling for water, not oil
Aquifers mapped in the 1960s are opened to farming and landowners are given free rein to pump them. The water formed some 20,000 years ago.
- 1980s
The pivots arrive
A guaranteed price far above the world market, interest-free loans and subsidised pumps make wheat irresistible. Circles spread from the Tabuk plain to Wadi As-Sirhan.
- 1992
The peak
4.1 million tonnes, and exports among the ten largest in the world, all of it run on non-renewable water.
- 2008
The decision to stop
The government begins cutting its purchases of local wheat by 12.5 per cent a year, to end them by 2016.
- 2016
The last state harvest
The state halts purchases of locally grown wheat and relies on imports.
- 2018
The fodder ban
A ban on growing green fodder takes effect, pushing large farms out of alfalfa and similar crops.
- 2023–26
Arizona pushes back
Arizona cancels one Fondomonte lease in Butler Valley and declines to renew the rest. A public nuisance case over pumping in the Ranegras Plain continues.
Water that costs nothing to take will be taken until it is gone.
There is a name for what is being traded here. The British academic Tony Allan introduced it in 1993: virtual water, meaning the water embedded in a product but invisible in the product itself. Import a tonne of wheat and you have quietly imported the 1,800 or so tonnes of water used to grow it. Seen in those terms, the kingdom did not so much abandon self-sufficiency as reroute it. The water still arrives, as grain in a ship and as hay from a valley in Arizona.
It would be easy, and wrong, to dismiss this as national vanity. The wheat programme was a rational response to a real fear. It was executed well, using an asset whose value nobody had priced. That last point is the lesson. It applies equally to a Saudi farmer receiving a guaranteed price in 1988 and to a dairy company operating in an unregulated Arizona basin in 2023.
The kingdom is now among the more clear-eyed states in the region about this problem, and it produces more desalinated water than any other country. Some circles still turn, growing dates and vegetables, as well as a quota of wheat from small farms that returned in 2019. Many do not. Look again at the photograph at the top of this page. The discs are still visible, but a good number of them are now the colour of the surrounding desert.
Water footprint of one kilogram, global averages
After Mekonnen and Hoekstra, counting rain, irrigation water and the water needed to dilute pollution. In a desert with almost no rain, far more of that total has to be pumped.
Images: centre-pivot fields from orbit © O.V.E.R.V.I.E.W. (CC BY 2.0); Wadi As-Sirhan 1984, 2000 and 2011, NASA/USGS Landsat and NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems ASTER (public domain); Arabian dust storm, Jeff Schmaltz, NASA MODIS (public domain); Arizona alfalfa © Chris English (CC BY-SA 3.0). Via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
27 references
Production and trade figures are FAOSTAT. Aquifer volumes are estimates and the published range is wide. Water-footprint figures are global averages and not specific to Saudi conditions, where a larger share of the total must be pumped.
- NASA Earth Observatory, “Agricultural fields, Wadi As-Sirhan Basin, Saudi Arabia”, Image of the Day, 5 March 2012.
- USGS EROS, Earthshots: Fossil Water.
- USGS EROS, “Saudi wheat experiment relied on fossil water”, Image of the Week, 21 November 2016.
- NASA Earth Observatory, “Crop circles in the desert”, 12 May 2012.
- FAO, irrigation water management training material, “Chapter 2: crop water needs”, table 5, approximate seasonal crop water needs.
- FAO, FAOSTAT, Production: crops and livestock products, Asia bulk download, wheat production in Saudi Arabia, 1980–2023.
- FAO, FAOSTAT, Trade: crops and livestock products, all data, wheat export quantity by country, 1992.
- Hussein, M., Al Jazeera, “How much of the Gulf’s water comes from desalination plants?”, 12 March 2026.
- Nowshirvani, V., MERIP, “The yellow brick road”, March 1987.
- van den Bosch, M., Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, “Saudi Arabia’s 60-year battle for food security”, 13 May 2024.
- Keulertz, M., AGBI, “The memory of water: Saudi Arabia’s troubled history”, 20 March 2024.
- FAO AQUASTAT, country profile: Saudi Arabia (2008 edition).
- Halverson, N., The World (PRX), “What does California have in common with a decades-old Saudi Arabian water mystery?”, 14 September 2015.
- UN-ESCWA and BGR (2013), Inventory of Shared Water Resources in Western Asia, chapter 10: Saq–Ram Aquifer System (West).
- Al-Jassem, D., Arab News, “Kingdom to halt wheat production by 2016”, 14 April 2013.
- Paul, K. (Reuters), The Peninsula, “Saudi Arabia has enough wheat to last more than six months: SAGO”, 23 February 2016.
- Mekonnen, M.M. and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2011), “The green, blue and grey water footprint of crops and derived crop products”, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 15, 1577–1600.
- Netherlands agricultural counsellor, “Saudi Arabia: ban on green fodder cultivation comes into effect”, 3 December 2018.
- USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Grain and Feed Annual, Saudi Arabia, SA2025-0003, 20 March 2025.
- Arab News, “Almarai acquires huge farmland in Arizona”, March 2014.
- CBS News and the Associated Press, “Arizona is canceling leases that allow Saudi-owned farm unlimited access to state’s groundwater”, 4 October 2023.
- Las Vegas Sun, “Where a Saudi company pumps desert groundwater, Arizona considers imposing limits”, 10 January 2026.
- Arizona Attorney General’s Office, “Attorney General Mayes sues Fondomonte for violating public nuisance law through excessive groundwater pumping”, 11 December 2024.
- ABC15 Arizona, “Governor Hobbs terminates water lease with Fondomonte Arizona”, October 2023.
- Arizona Attorney General’s Office, “Attorney General Mayes wins ruling to keep public nuisance lawsuit against Fondomonte moving forward”, 15 May 2026.
- Stockholm Water Foundation, “2008: Tony Allan”, Stockholm Water Prize laureates.
- Allan, T. (1997), “‘Virtual water’: a long term solution for water short Middle Eastern economies?”, paper presented at the British Association Festival of Science, University of Leeds, 9 September 1997.
Every figure and claim in this story rests on the references above. The stories list them here rather than marking them in the text; the country reports and hubs keep their inline markers.