Tom Projects accepts agricultural mandates in Egypt from 200 feddans upward. One feddan is 4,200 m², so 200 feddans is 840,000 m², roughly 84 hectares of contiguous desert land, and that is the smallest project we will source, study, structure, and supervise. Below that line, desert agriculture rarely carries its own water infrastructure, its own management team, or any real procurement power, and we would rather decline a mandate than run one that cannot work.
What a feddan is, and what 200 of them mean
The feddan is Egypt’s standard land unit: 4,200 square meters, a little over an acre. Two hundred feddans is 840,000 m² in one block, about 84 hectares, roughly 208 acres, or about 0.84 of a square kilometer. In an established European farming region that would already be a large holding. In an Egyptian reclamation zone it is close to the minimum sensible size, because in the desert you are not buying a farm, you are building the conditions for one: water, power, roads, people.
The 200-feddan floor is not a marketing device. It is the point at which the three fixed costs of desert agriculture, meaning water infrastructure, full-time management, and serious procurement, stop crushing a project’s economics. The next three sections are those three costs, one by one.
Why Egypt at this scale at all
Egypt is one of the world’s largest table olive producers, accounting for around 18% of world production in the 2024/25 crop year (source: International Olive Council). That position was not built on rain. It was built on engineered irrigation across reclaimed desert, extended by public programs such as the national project to reclaim 1.5 million feddans of desert land, inaugurated in 2015 with sites across the Western Desert (source: Ahram Online).
Our own olive work centers on the West Minya reclamation zone, planting Koroneiki and Picual under drip irrigation; the background is in our post on olive farm investment in Egypt, and the wider country picture is on our Egypt page. The point to hold onto: the state builds agricultural land at a scale measured in hundreds of thousands of feddans. Participating sensibly means matching that logic, not subdividing it.
Water infrastructure does not scale down
In a reclamation zone there is no river at the gate. Water comes from wells and allocations, moved by pumping stations, cleaned through filtration, buffered in reservoirs, and delivered by pressurized drip lines with fertigation equipment at the head. That chain is engineered as one system, and its cost is lumpy: the well, the pump station, the filtration head, and the reservoir cost broadly the same across a wide range of areas they can serve.
A small plot cannot amortize that chain. It either shares infrastructure it does not control, which in the desert means someone else decides when your trees drink, or it under-builds and farms on hope. Water is the central diligence question in every Egypt mandate we study: the source and the legal terms of the allocation, the energy cost of lifting and moving it, and the salinity trend over years, not seasons. That study costs the same for 20 feddans as for 2,000. At 200 feddans and above, the project can carry both the study and the steel.
Management overhead is nearly flat
Desert orchards are unforgiving of part-time attention. Fertigation scheduling, salinity monitoring, pruning, pest scouting: these are daily disciplines, and they need a resident team of farm manager, agronomist, irrigation engineer, and trained labor. The cost of that team is close to flat whether it oversees 80 hectares or 400. Spread it over a small absentee plot and one of two things happens: the owner pays a management ratio no crop can support, or the plot gets caretaker attention and the trees show it three years later, when correcting the damage is expensive. At 200 feddans the team is affordable per hectare and fully occupied. That is most of the argument for the rule.
Procurement power starts at scale
Everything a desert farm buys is priced by volume: certified nursery stock, drip line and filtration spares, fertilizer programs, harvest labor, haulage, and, above all, the conversation with processors and offtakers. A 200-feddan project orders in container quantities, contracts inputs for the season, and is worth a processor’s attention at harvest. A 10-feddan plot pays retail for everything and queues last at the mill. In a thin-margin agricultural business, the spread between wholesale and retail is often the difference between an asset and a hobby.
What an Egypt mandate includes
We do not sell plots in Egypt and we do not publish prices. We take mandates: a client engages Tom Projects to deliver one project, from raw land to operating farm, under the client’s own ownership structure. Each mandate runs through four stages.
- Sourcing. We select and screen land inside designated reclamation zones: allocation status, title pathway, water terms, power, and access.
- Agronomy and law study. Soil, water, and climate suitability for olive or date palm on the specific block, alongside the legal study of how this specific client, foreign or domestic, can hold and operate the asset, including company (SPV) structures where preferred.
- Structuring. The holding structure, contracts, and governance that put the client in control of the land, the water terms, and the operator.
- Supervised operation. We appoint the operating team, set the agronomic program, and supervise against it, with reporting a board can actually read.
Two crops only: olives and date palm. Both are proven on Egyptian reclamation land, and both are long-lived productive assets rather than seasonal bets.
Who this is for
The mandate model fits three kinds of client: institutions allocating to real assets, family offices that want direct ownership of productive land rather than fund exposure, and land-holding companies extending into agriculture. What they share is a balance sheet that can hold an illiquid asset for a decade and a governance culture that expects studies before commitments. If the goal is a small ticket, a quick exit, or a passive yield product, this is the wrong instrument, and we will say so in the first meeting.
The honest risks
Scale manages risk; it does not delete it. Water governance is the spine of the whole model: allocation terms, aquifer behavior, and pumping energy costs decide project economics more than any other variable, which is why they sit at the center of every study we run. Establishment risk concentrates in the early years, when trees are young and mistakes are easy to make and expensive to discover. Market risk is real and visible in the public record: Egypt’s own table olive crop dropped 20% in the 2024/25 season (source: International Olive Council), a reminder that even the largest producers have hard years. And exit is a negotiated sale of a working farm, not a listed instrument: plan to hold.
Figures are indicative; agricultural outcomes depend on climate, water, and market factors outside anyone’s control.
FAQ
Why exactly 200 feddans?
Because that is roughly where the fixed costs of desert farming, a complete water chain, a resident professional team, and wholesale procurement, stop overwhelming a project’s economics. It is an engineering and payroll floor, not a marketing number. We would rather run fewer, larger mandates that work than many small ones that cannot.
Can foreign institutions hold farmland in Egypt?
Both are proven at scale under Egypt’s dry, high-light conditions; our olive work centers on Koroneiki and Picual in West Minya. Focus is part of the risk discipline: two crops we can study, staff, and supervise deeply are worth more than ten supervised thinly. With a conversation about scale, crop, and ownership structure, followed by a scoped study. Request full details and tell us what you have in mind. If Egypt at 200 feddans is not the right fit, we will say so early.Why only olives and date palm?
How does a mandate begin?