Date Palms, Vegetables and Cattle Feed

AISuwaiket owns and operates in excess of 3090 acres of agricultural farm land. The main products of these farms are palm date, vegetables, and cattle feed such as alfalfa, barley, rhodes grass etc. Additionally, AISuwaiket’s agricultural activities include live stock farming such as calves, sheep, goats, ostrich, chicken, ducks and quail.

During the second half of the last decade AISuwaiket’s agricultural division developed two vital and important industrial projects directly related to its core activities and products. In 1995 AISuwaiket established date processing plant with AISuwaiket farms.

In 1996 AISuwaiket put forward daring plans to establish a plant to produce “predigested” cattle feed, whereby the main feedstock of this plant are the core products of AISuwaiket’s farms such as alfalfa, barley and rhodes grass, etc., in addition to vegetable cuttings and other fibrous materials. The main objective behind this plant is to create predigested feed for live stock in the form of pellets that yield considerably more nutrition than the conventional feed.

Date Palm Tissue Culture

Plant tissue culture is a biotechnology in which the whole plant is developed from any plant part or tissue on an artificial nutrient medium under controlled environment conditions. This involves four main stages: initiation, multiplication, rooting, & hardening. AISuwaiket’s plant and tissue culture laboratories main work revolves around date palm tissue culture.

In the four stages of tissue development young offshoots of date palm are detached from the mother plant, excised to expose shoot tips, parts of which are sterilized and inoculated on a medium.

Later stages involve proliferation which occurs in terms of somatic embryos or direct organogenesis. These are then transferred to a rooting phase.

Multiplied plants, separated form the mother clump (proliferated culture), are kept in a rooting medium for in vitro rooting, subsequently these are transferred to green houses for hardening process. To make the laboratory plants survive in natural conditions and environment, hardening and acclimatization of the plant is necessary which is completed in green houses.

In establishing this project, AISuwaiket aims at developing healthy, disease free and disease resistant date palm plants capable of producing substantial crops after few years of planting in the farms.