The idea behind Drylands Farms: large-scale climate-smart agriculture near Africa's major cities

Farming has always depended on the weather. But the weather is no longer dependable.

Climate Smart Agriculture is a way of producing food that answers this reality. It rests on three commitments: growing more with less, building resilience against droughts, floods and heat, and shrinking farming's environmental footprint.

At Drylands Farms, we take these commitments literally. By growing inside controlled environments rather than open fields, we protect crops from the extremes that increasingly define African growing seasons. We use a fraction of the water of conventional farming, recirculating what we don't use. We grow year-round, so supply doesn't collapse when the climate misbehaves. And we do it close to the markets we serve, cutting food miles and waste along the way.

Climate Smart Agriculture isn't about farming less. It's about farming better — producing more nutritious food, more reliably, on less land, with less water, whatever the weather does next.

We believe this is what the future of African agriculture looks like. Not a return to the past, but a leap ahead of the climate curve.