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No screens, just sand dunes: UAE family raises children on 200-year-old farm
The farm is part of land the Alremeithi tribe has worked for generations, through date farming and pearl diving that predate the union; 'the history of UAE is history of the family'
- PUBLISHED: Sat 15 Aug 2026, 6:00 AM
Saleh, now five, was two weeks old the first time his mother took him to the farm. His sister Sara, three, made the same trip at the same age.
In a special interview with Khaleej Times, shedding light on Emirati families as part of the Year of Family, Jessica Queitsch and her husband Humaid Alremeithi open up about an approach to raising children rooted in the land and a nearly 200-year-old family farm in Sweihan.
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Queitsch didn't want to wait to bring her children there. She wanted them breathing farm air and meeting animals even before they could form memories of it, building the kind of immunity and comfort that, she says, only comes from early, repeated exposure.
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That instinct has shaped how the family visits the farm. Every trip starts with a walkthrough. Since they aren't at the farm daily, something has always shifted, a new crop coming in, a fence moved, an animal that wasn't there last time. The children greet the animals like old friends. Some visits they collect eggs. Other times it's corn, which Saleh treats less like a vegetable and more like a prize. When a lamb or a kid goat is born, Queitsch lifts it up so everyone can say salaam.
Respect before skill
At their age, the lessons stay light. Nobody hands a five-year-old a real farming task. What they get instead is exposure — which animals welcome a hug, which ones, like the farm's bulls, need distance and caution, a lesson Saleh has clearly absorbed; he's quick to warn visitors which bull drools the most and is best avoided.
Queitsch teaches this early and deliberately. She'd rather her children know the shape of local sand dunes and the names of desert wildlife than keep pace with trends most children their age already track on a screen. Building a fire, setting up camp, learning what an animal needs to be cared for properly, these count, in her house, as more valuable than anything a phone can teach.
Some of that comes from where the family's roots sit. The farm itself is nearly 200 years old, part of land the Alremeithi tribe has worked for generations, through date farming and pearl diving that predate the UAE's formation. "The history of the UAE is the history of the family," Queitsch says. "It's all intertwined." That's the inheritance she wants Saleh and Sara to carry, not just farming know-how, but a sense of where they come from. It shows up in small ways. Saleh stretching a lesson about caterpillars into dinosaurs, Sara noticing on her own that goats and caterpillars share a taste for the same leaves, the two of them building what looks, from the outside, like a language only they understand.
A business that scales to what the children need
The family also runs Farm2Table, a project that began as a restaurant at Expo 2020 Dubai and later took the shape of a food truck touring all seven emirates, connecting small local farms to a wider audience. It has scaled down since, deliberately. With two young children now at the centre of things, the business runs on catering and homemade goods, honey-based sweets, date products, nothing built for volume.
Saleh has been part of it from the start, tagging along on food truck runs and picking up, without quite realising it, how a business actually works. For Queitsch, the line between family and work barely exists. "Family time can easily be a day at the farm or a day in the desert," she says. "Family time can also be a day managing the business, selling goods at a pop up." She doesn't measure the company's success by sales. "It helps them grow, and it helps them learn," she says. "I like them to be connected to it, and to the farm as well."
Emirati Journalist