A conversation with Motti Levin, CEO of Haifa Group, on plant nutrition, the future of agriculture, and the challenge of “feeding the world”
To watch the full interview with Motti Levin (English subtitles) Click here<<
In this interview, Motti Levin, CEO of Haifa Group, discusses the company’s role in advancing precision agriculture as a response to global challenges of food security, resource scarcity, and sustainability. He explains how Haifa Group focuses on precise plant nutrition (feeding the plant rather than the soil) to increase yields, improve crop quality, and significantly reduce the use of water, minerals, and other inputs, while minimizing environmental impact. Rooted in Israel’s unique agricultural constraints, this approach reflects the country’s long-standing leadership in agri-tech innovation.
The conversation also explores Haifa Group’s investments in circular economy principles, including advanced production facilities in the Negev region, the development of blue ammonia powered by renewable energy, and the capture and reuse of CO₂ for agricultural and industrial applications. Levin highlights the importance of digital tools, data-driven farming, and holistic solutions that combine precision fertilization, biostimulants, and technology, positioning agriculture as a smarter, more efficient, and more sustainable system for feeding a growing global population.
To watch the full interview with Motti Levin (English subtitles) Click here<<
Full Interview
Hi Motti, thank you for joining us. Let’s start with Haifa Group. Not everyone knows the company well. At its core, this is about agriculture and food, right?
Absolutely. Food security is at the heart of what we do. Haifa Group, formerly known as Haifa Chemicals, which was honestly a bit of a copywriting mistake from the 1960s, was founded at a time when industry, including chemical industry, was viewed very differently.
Our production processes involve chemistry in terms of reactions between materials, but we do not manufacture chemicals and we do not use hazardous chemicals in the way people often assume. What we actually produce are fertilizers and plant nutrition solutions designed for precise crop nutrition. Our world is the world of plant nutrition.
So in that world, where does Haifa Group stand? And where does Israel stand compared to the rest of the world?
Agriculture globally relies heavily on natural resources: fertilizers, water, land. The idea of “fertilizing the soil” is something many of us grew up with, and it carries almost romantic connotations.
But in reality, this is also why fertilization has gained a reputation as environmentally harmful: over-fertilization, excessive water use, runoff, evaporation, and greenhouse gas emissions.
Haifa operates in a very different paradigm – precision fertilization. We feed the plant, not the soil. A pepper grown in Baja California grows under very different conditions than one grown in Israel’s Arava region, and it requires a different nutritional approach. Just as we don’t raise our children using a generic formula, we don’t treat crops generically. A potato grown in South Africa requires a different solution than a potato grown in Poland.
This approach, which we call precision agriculture or precision fertilization, allows for significantly higher yields, improved crop qualities such as longer shelf life, while at the same time reducing mineral inputs, water consumption, and environmental impact.
Fascinating! And naturally, most people don’t really understand how this works. We’ll come back to precision agriculture in a moment. But where does Israel fit into this picture globally, in terms of industry and innovation?
It’s quite interesting actually. Today, terms like environment, sustainability, and food security are part of everyday language. Governments set policies around them, international agreements are signed, and in Israel we now even have a minister for food security.
But Israel, since its founding, has effectively been an island nation, semi-arid, with chronic water scarcity, rapid population growth driven by immigration, and constant pressure on food supply.
Already in the 1950s and 1960s, Israel was forced to deal with challenges that we now label as sustainability and food security, concepts that sound modern, but were existential necessities here from day one. Those constraints are precisely what gave rise to what we now know as Israeli agri-tech, and why Israel has built such a strong global reputation in this field.
And when Haifa Group operates globally today, you can actually sense that reputation?
Very much so. In August, for example, Haifa Group was selected to lead the Plant Nutrition Working Group of the International Fertilizer Association. I personally serve as its chair. But more importantly, this reflects the reputation we’ve built as a company that leads agriculture toward smarter, more precise, and more environmentally responsible solutions that address sustainability while ensuring food security.
That said, most of the agricultural world still operates using traditional methods. Farmers often prefer to work the way their great-grandparents did because they need to maximize output in the current season. Teaching, guiding, and implementing new methods takes time.
Today, we operate in 18 countries, each serving as a regional hub, and we reach farmers in over 100 countries. Yet the majority of global agriculture still relies on outdated, resource-intensive methods that are neither efficient nor environmentally sound. That’s both our challenge, and our opportunity.
A significant opportunity indeed. Haifa Group’s main plant today is in the Negev Desert, correct? And much of it is relatively new?
Yes. The plant was built with extensive consideration for circular economy principles. It was initially established in the 1990s to support our original facility in the Haifa Bay and was designed for an annual capacity of 100,000 tons of potassium nitrate.
We are now gradually increasing capacity to 400,000 tons of potassium nitrate, four times the original scale, alongside an additional 200,000 to 300,000 tons of other products.
But this transformation isn’t only about downstream production capacity. It also involves upstream investment in raw materials. Our primary raw material is ammonia, a substance that has unfortunately developed a negative reputation.
And you’re happy to address that perception.
Absolutely. And we’ll get to that. Importantly, this will be Israel’s only blue ammonia facility, which is ammonia produced using renewable energy. We’re building a solar energy field adjacent to the plant, alongside multiple circular economy initiatives, including a system to capture and liquefy CO₂ for use in industries such as desalination, food and beverage, and agriculture.
Increasing CO₂ concentration in greenhouses actually boosts yields. In trials conducted with the Ramat Negev R&D center on tomato crops, CO₂ injection increased yields by 15-20%. That’s dramatic.
So the same CO₂ that’s usually seen as a problem becomes a resource.
Exactly. That’s one of the core principles of the circular economy. And it’s not the only one. Expanding a facility from 100,000 to 400,000 tons requires rethinking infrastructure entirely. This year, we inaugurated a new rail connection with Israel Railways and built a terminal for 3,000 containers. That alone removes thousands of trucks from the roads.
All of this is happening during a time when Israeli industry isn’t exactly receiving strong tailwinds from its broader environment or government, to put it diplomatically.
Very interesting. Let’s go back to ammonia. Haifa Group has long been associated with ammonia, often in a negative context. You’ve said that perception is misplaced. Why?
First, ammonia is a gas, not ammonium nitrate, which is a solid salt and was responsible for the Beirut explosion. Ammonia is derived from natural gas and is produced via the Haber-Bosch process, named after Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, both Nobel Prize winners.
Haber, a German-Jewish scientist, was famously called “the man who made bread from air,” because the process captures nitrogen from the atmosphere and makes it available to plants.
This is critically important. Global population has grown from 1.5 billion to over 8 billion in just over a century, and according to the FAO, by 2050 we will exceed 11 billion. All those people need to be fed.
Without ammonia-based fertilizers, roughly half of the world’s population would not exist today. That’s the fundamental context.
In terms of safety: ammonia is not explosive and not flammable. It has a strong odor and is transported at -32°C under atmospheric pressure. If released, it rises quickly and can be detected from a distance. It’s hazardous, like many industrial materials, but manageable, and certainly not the catastrophe it’s often portrayed as.
Since the ammonia tank in Haifa Bay was shut down, Haifa Group has used a logistics model based on importing ammonia in small ISO tanks. Soon, with the launch of our blue ammonia plant, we’ll produce ammonia locally, for both our own use and for the broader Israeli economy.
When will that come online?
We’re just before commissioning. In 2025, we expect to begin using ammonia produced on-site toward the end of the year. This is a major project, over $300 million in ammonia-related investment alone, $330 million including supporting infrastructure, and nearly $700 million total investment at the new Negev facility.
That will clearly have major environmental and operational impacts.
Not only environmental but economic as well. Eliminating the transpot of ammonia alone has enormous benefits. There has been a government decision since 2017 that Israel should produce its own ammonia, based on our natural gas resources. This project delivers on that policy.
To conclude: you mentioned precision agriculture and the challenge of feeding a growing world. Where is agriculture heading? For those who don’t live this day to day.
Precision agriculture is the future because it allows us to produce much more using far fewer resources. That’s where real value and real returns lie.
But producing precise fertilizers isn’t enough. Haifa invests heavily in holistic solutions: plant biostimulants, stress resilience, extreme weather response, even tree-trunk strength in forestry. These solutions are often organic and non-chemical.
Add to that the digital layer. We’ve developed free fertilization optimization software, “MRI”-style diagnostics for plants that assess nitrogen levels, carbon savings calculators, and platforms that could eventually support carbon credit markets.
The future of agriculture is more precise, more intelligent, and far more holistic.
So the farmer we imagine with muddy boots is becoming a high-tech operator.
Exactly. Even the Indian farmer walking behind a buffalo with a wooden plow has a smartphone in his pocket. We recently inaugurated Haifa India in Mumbai, not because we were new to the market, but because agriculture there is evolving rapidly and adopting digital solutions at scale.
Motti, thank you for this fascinating conversation. You’ve opened a window into concepts many of us hear about but don’t always understand.
Thank you very much. The deeper we go into precision agriculture, the closer we get to food security and a more sustainable, resilient future.
