Maria Al Arasia Project
Project's Owner: Maria Al Shammari
This project seeks to preserve the Arasia tree as part of the legacy of ancient meanings. Their numbers began to shrink and decline. Therefore, our goal was to increase their cultivation and spread them on our farm and preserve their fruits as they can be eaten when ripe or prepare jams from them to preserve them.
Project Objectives
- Producing agricultural crops and then manufacturing and selling them using modern agricultural methods and advanced technologies in agriculture and food processing.
- Providing job opportunities
- Changing the thinking pattern of the local community so that their ideas are directed towards self-employment and the private sector instead of waiting for government jobs, especially women.
- Spreading the idea of organic agriculture and optimizing the use of resources through modern methods.
- Encouraging the people in the vicinity of the project to return to practicing agriculture, as most of them own land but it is abandoned
Regarding the environmental and developmental challenges that the project will aim at addressing, they can be listed as follows:
- Promoting the culture of work and production among young people, especially females, and moving away from the job by returning to the land and from chemical fertilizers through the use of organic materials in agriculture after processing and fermentation. This will address the challenge of using chemicals as fertilizers on crops, thus causing contamination of crops and affecting health.
- Investing household waste and farm waste in the manufacture of teaching aids, materials, forms and landscapes that are used in education and in our daily lives. This addresses the challenge of throwing waste and organic materials in excess of household needs.
The National Agricultural Research Center (NARC) seeks to support this pioneering project by transforming the site into a station concerned with ecotourism and the marketing of traditional and value-added agricultural products through networking between the project and the supporting and donor bodies.