You can see it long before you reach it, a vast mirrored tower hovering over the dusty orange dirt below.
Three hours' drive north of Adelaide, Sundrop Farms is officially open for business, growing tomatoes hydroponically in a place where crops have never been grown before.
It was an idea German-born, London-based Philipp Saumweber came up with more than seven years ago.
This month, his vision has become a reality.
"We started completely from scratch here in South Australia in about 2009. And we've grown from one person to a company of about 300 people in that time. And, really, this is the first large-scale project and the beginning of our expansion, both here in Australia and abroad."
At Sundrop, tomatoes are grown in greenhouses that, unlike most, do not rely on groundwater.
Instead, a pipeline draws water from the nearby Spencer Gulf.
And a field of mirrors harvests energy from the sun to desalinate the sea water.
University of Adelaide water and environmental policy professor Mike Young consulted on the project in its early days and says the growing process is unique.
"There's no energy being used, so it's completely sustainable. So it gets the greenhouse gas tick - in fact, a treble or quadruple tick for greenhouse gas. In terms of other things, the amount of chemicals used are very low, it's isolated from everything else, no disease risk and things that are normally around."
Tomatoes grown at Sundrop Farms' Port Augusta greenhouses will be shipped to Coles supermarkets across the country.
Coles merchandise director Chris Nicholas says it provides a solution to the seasonal shortage of truss tomatoes.
"The key to this is that, in the winter, when it's really difficult to get good quality and good price truss tomatoes for our customers, this facility comes into its own. And so our customers will be able to get brilliant quality truss tomatoes at a time when they're almost unavailable. And they will be able to get them across Australia."
Sundrop hopes to produce around 15,000 tonnes of tomatoes every year from its South Australian facility.
And there are also projects underway in the United States and Portugal.
But it took the company's in-house team more than five years of experimenting to get the growing balance right.
Now the model has been tried and tested, Professor Young says it could aid food production in some of the world's most arid regions - where growing food had seemed impossible.
"I think it's at the real frontier of where food production for a lot of fresh produce is likely to go in the world. It's exciting."
