Can Hydroponics and AI Rescue Farming in Kurdistan?
A wave of agri-entrepreneurs is proving that farming can survive Northern Iraq’s unrelenting droughts and desertification
In the early days of her health food business, Dilpak Yousif got a dose of reality. Her plan to make healthy food delicious and promote better eating habits in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq hinged on quality ingredients. Her mistake was assuming they would be easy to source.
Contacting one of the major farmers in Zakho, a province known for its fertile agricultural lands, she reeled off a shopping list of organic produce. To her surprise, he laughed. “He said organic produce won’t last, it looks bad, and they aren’t available in small quantities. So I got a dose of reality,” Yousif, 29, recalled.
Wonky-shaped cucumbers and blotchy tomatoes are not a problem for Yousif, who launched her health food brand Healthy Pak in Duhok in 2020. Her priority is quality and taste—something she wasn’t getting from produce available in the supermarkets.
Local vegetables lacked flavor, so she confronted her grocer about his cucumbers that were vivid green but lacked taste. “He said if only you knew where this was planted, you would never eat it. That really hit home.”
Five years on, Yousif’s business is thriving, with a menu of over 150 dishes and a growing roster of clients who prize her tasty, nutritious cuisine. But finding high-quality ingredients locally remains a challenge, despite the large number of farms just outside her doorstep. “Sometimes you just have to accept what’s available,” she said.
Cucumbers, potatoes, and peppers are among the many crops produced in Kurdistan, which sits on some of the most fertile soil in the Middle East. But climate change and water scarcity threaten the sustainability of the sector, forcing farmers to compromise.
Many are trapped in a ‘pesticide treadmill’, relying heavily on chemicals to produce profitable short-term yields. With mounting concern around the health risks of pesticides and contamination scares, including a cholera outbreak last year, pressure is mounting to clean up farming practices.
“Lots of farmers in Iraq use chemical fertilizers and pesticides to such a degree that they don’t eat the things they grow,” said Sherko Karim, who spent years observing local farmers before launching his agritech business HydroLife in 2023.
As the country gets hotter and drier, water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are falling, with some reports indicating a drop of more than 50 percent in recent decades. Farmers in Iraq are increasingly forced to rely on irrigating vegetables with sewage water, which prompted the previous cholera outbreak in 2022.
The practice is driven by water shortages and polluted river water, despite authorities in Baghdad and Erbil pledging to address the flow of untreated sewage into rivers and streams.
Karim is part of a new generation of farmers exploring technology-driven solutions that bypass reliance on dwindling natural resources and produce organic crops that are more resistant to disease.
His business is pioneering the use of hydroponics in Kurdistan, producing crops without soil in a controlled indoor farm. Plants are fed on mineral nutrient salts, using up to 90 percent less water than traditional field watering methods.
Technologies like AI and machine learning are incorporated to optimize efficiency.
“We saw a need for a more organic way of growing products for the market,” said Karim, who hopes to “change the culture of farming” in Kurdistan by adapting new technologies to local contexts.
His new hydroponic greenhouse, built from recycled materials, will be a learning institute for farmers and a laboratory for harnessing the latest technologies in Kurdistan. “Interest is not yet at the level we would like, but in areas where farmers lack access to clean water, systems like hydroponics are attractive,” he said.
The benefits of an indoor environment that’s resistant to climate change are hard to ignore in Iraq, where between 10,000 and 25,000 hectares of agricultural land are lost to desertification, drought, and other climate-related causes each year. Rising temperatures and environmental degradation have ravaged the region once known as the Fertile Crescent, turning once-lush arable land into parched plains.
As reports of record low rainfall and rising temperatures become a near annual occurrence, the social fallout of climate change is changing how people live. A series of reports by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has noted an upward trend in displacement, with a growing number of farmers in Iraq forced to relinquish their livelihoods and leave lands that have been in the family for generations.
“For the fourth year in a row, we hear stories of how severe drought conditions undermine Iraqis’ ability to farm their own lands,” said Sue Clarke, NRC’s country director for Iraq.
“This is happening against a backdrop of prolonged displacement and a chronic mismanagement of water resources. Climate change has compounded the devastation left by years of conflict. The world’s largest polluters, which also happen to be among the richest, must share the collective responsibility of investing in climate-resilient transformational projects in countries like Iraq.”
There’s little support for farmers at the political level, despite the industry accounting for around 10 percent of GDP in Iraqi Kurdistan. A weak regulatory environment means waste continues to flow freely into rivers and streams, with few incentives to help farmers adopt better practices around irrigation and chemical use.
Instead, entrepreneurs like Hussam Falih are developing alternative ways of growing that can withstand the country’s harsh climate and adapt to environmental decline.
His company, Eco Fruits, uses technology to create and monitor optimal conditions for plant growth at its indoor farm in Iraq. He aims to modernize the sector and provide locally-grown produce without the chemicals. “Traditionally, in the MENA region, farmers spray their crops with pesticides that contain chemicals to treat all kinds of diseases. With this new system, we can monitor the unique requirements of the crops and reduce that [pesticide use] to a minimum,” said Falih, who recently published a website that uses AI to diagnose plant diseases.
He started on strawberries and plans to move on to cucumbers and tomatoes, followed by produce that’s not traditionally grown in Iraq, including dragon fruit and mangosteen. “This technology can have a positive impact on food security by giving people an incentive to try indoor farming,” Falih said. “Crops can’t survive the summers here, but with my technology, we can grow all year.”
In Sulaymaniyah, the Vim Foundation is harvesting the first yields from a new hydroponic project in conjunction with the University of Sulaimani. The project aims to establish an educational and research center while providing the university’s dormitories with fresh produce.
The future of farming in Kurdistan will have to break from its past. With the region’s rich agricultural heritage under threat, sustainable methods like hydroponics and AI-driven crop monitoring offer a way forward. Centuries of tradition are colliding with the twin pressures of climate change and water scarcity, leaving farmers with few viable options if they refuse to adapt.
Entrepreneurs like Yousif, Karim, and Falih are proving that the choice is not between abandoning agriculture or clinging to failing methods. There is a third option—one that blends technology with deep local knowledge, and innovation with necessity.
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