Building Billion-Pound Farms Where Desert Meets Data
Eslam Hassan
Finance Director
Eden Agriculture Investment and Development
Building Billion-Pound Farms Where Desert Meets Data
Eslam Hassan
Finance Director
Eden Agriculture Investment and Development
Eslam Hassan -Most Inspiring Global Finance Leaders 2025
Desert sands are no match for data, strategy, and disciplined finance, at least not when Eslam Hassan is at the helm. As CFO of Eden Agriculture Investment & Development, he is orchestrating a multi-billion-pound transformation, converting barren landscapes into thriving, tech-enabled farmland. Every decision is measured in efficiency, sustainability, and tangible impact, every drop of water and unit of energy accounted for. Â
Eslam’s career has been defined by navigating complexity at scale. At Canal Sugar in Minya, the world’s largest beet sugar factory, he led the SAP finance workstream, stabilizing core systems and establishing a robust chart of accounts. That experience sharpened his ability to make disciplined, high-stakes decisions, a skill he now applies to Eden’s ambitious build-out. Â
Amid FX volatility, he made a decisive call: re-sequencing capital, front-loading essential assets, and anchoring investments to green finance incentives under the EBRD GEFF framework. The outcome is a smart-farming rollout that balances profitability with sustainability. For Eslam, leadership is about sequencing, standards, and disciplined execution. Under his guidance, Eden is turning desert challenges into a blueprint for the future of sustainable, tech-driven agribusiness. Â
Discussing his work, challenges and strategies, Eslam delves deep into his journey in this exclusive interview with TradeFlock.
What are your key financial challenges, and how are you managing them amid inflation, FX volatility, and rising costs?
FX exposure on imported CAPEX, pivots, wells, and energy systems, is managed by diversifying suppliers and currencies, structuring milestone-indexed contracts, and staging LCs to reduce timing risk. Where possible, we link future cash inflows to FX, creating natural hedges. Inflation and rising operating costs are tackled through monthly zero-based cost sprints, with field-to-finance telemetry from wells, pivots, and fuel sensors feeding Power BI dashboards for same-day variance action.Â
We also prioritise green assets eligible for GEFF and other incentives to reduce lifetime costs. Liquidity across our multi-phase, off-grid build is maintained through rolling 13-week cash forecasts, covenant headroom buffers, and phased commissioning, allowing early assets to contribute cash before the next deployment wave.
Which digital tools have the greatest impact on financial control and visibility at Eden?
At Eden, Farm ERP forms the core of our operations-to-finance backbone, unifying field activities, inputs, inventory, and cost centres by block and pivot. Every PO, goods receipt, and issue is linked to plots and work orders, giving real-time unit economics per feddan and a clean three-way audit trail. Microsoft Project governs CAPEX rollout, integrating master schedules, WBS, milestones, and earned-value tracking (BCWS/BCWP).
Aligning % complete with cash-flow curves allows us to sequence drawdowns, protect covenants, and reprioritise when FX or input costs fluctuate. Power BI powers decision-grade analytics, combining certified datasets with row-level security to generate flash P&Ls, cash bridges, and FX exposure reports, refreshed daily with field telemetry from wells, pivots, and fuel sensors. Early green-finance evaluation under GEFF and EBRD ensures incentives are baked into business cases, reducing the lifetime cost of capital and OPEX while accelerating sustainable, tech-enabled farming
When can finance systems become a risk instead of a control, and how do you safeguard against it?
Finance systems become a risk when master-data governance is weak, SoD and approval matrices drift during cutover, or change management underestimates real user behaviour, creating offline workarounds. My playbook starts with designing in controls—maker-checker flows, tolerance thresholds, and embedded workflows, not just policy PDFs. During cutover, we run dry migrations, reconcile opening balances line by line, and maintain a scoped manual fallback for critical disbursements.Â
Data guardianship is enforced through central stewardship, audit-traced master changes, and automated validations. War-room stabilisation tracks daily KPIs like GR/IR, unmatched POs, and failed postings, with freeze windows to prevent scope creep. I applied this approach at Canal Sugar’s SAP go-live and now at Eden, scaling digital controls from Day 1.
Looking ahead, what shifts should finance leaders prepare for now, not react to later?
Green finance is moving from optional to compliance-grade. Incentive-backed facilities like GEFF, EBRD, and IFC are expanding through local banks, making it essential for finance leaders to industrialize measurement of energy and water performance and maintain verification trails. Doing so preserves eligibility and lowers the cost of capital. Real-time compliance and data rails are next: as green credit lines and EU-supported technical assistance scale, reporting cycles will tighten and assurance will accelerate, requiring audit-ready data spines instead of spreadsheets.
AI-assisted controls will become baseline, embedding continuous monitoring and anomaly detection into ERP and treasury, with finance teams responsible for model governance. Policy and market convergence in agriculture will also reshape capital planning: smart-farming economics, electricity access, water efficiency, climate resilience, will drive national programs, demanding that leaders price policy risk and opportunity into capital plans while building optionality into OPEX models.
At Eden, this approach is already in action. Multi-billion GBP, tech-enabled agribusiness spans hundreds of thousands of acres, with ERP-driven controls, telemetry-to-finance reporting, and phased CAPEX to de-risk cash. Early GEFF-aligned investments in irrigation and hybrid energy enhance unit economics and resilience, linking field productivity directly to cost drivers and cash cycles. Every feddan is managed to a target unit cost and yield.
