01The conditioner
Zander Humus
Dredged sediment, frozen dry and graded. Holds water at twice its own volume, holds fertiliser, and holds salt away from the root. One application lasts up to fifteen years.
Zander Corporation/Mells, Somerset/Est. 1992
Fifteen thousand yearsat the bottom of a lake.Nine weeks in the desert.
Zander is an organic sediment dredged out of the choked lakes of northern Europe. Laid into desert ground with the right , it establishes trees and crops on a fraction of the water they would otherwise need — and goes on doing it for fifteen years.
92.8%
Less irrigation, Al Jouf olive trial
15 yr
Working life of one application
0
Chemical fertiliser required
1×
Treatments in the life of a tree
The material
It began as a nuisance.
In the flat glacial shield that runs from Poland through the Baltic States into Russia and Ukraine there are lakes so choked with organic matter that only the water at the very surface is clear of it. is the remains of lakeside reed, fallen year after year into water too still and too starved of oxygen to rot it properly.
Nothing burnt it away. It settled instead as a jelly, roughly a millimetre a year, since the glaciers retreated — and the vitamins, organic acids and minerals held in the original vegetation were preserved rather than lost. Fifteen thousand laminations later, the lakes need dredging and somebody has to do something with what comes up.
Dry it in a normal Polish winter, blend it, bag it, and ship it to a desert, and it will grow an olive tree on one litre of water a day. That is the whole business. The rest is .
80–90%
Organic matter
200%
Water absorption by volume
200–300
meq/100 g cation exchange
The system
Three products. Two are enough for most jobs.
01
02The root system
AridGrow Mycorrhiza
Six strains of Glomus fungus, selected out of saline arid ground. It grows into the root, then out into the soil — a mycelium up to seven hundred times the volume of the roots themselves.
03The season's work
Zander Humate
A liquid extract of the parent material, sprayed on the leaf at one part in four hundred. One litre treats a hectare. It is the part of the system that fits in a container and ships anywhere.
The result that matters
In the desert, an olive tree drinks fourteen litres a day.
At in northern Saudi Arabia — five million olive trees, three hundred and twenty-six wells, and a new abstraction tax — the treated trees took the equivalent of one.
They did it standing in ground six times more saline than the conventionally farmed control, which had the better soil throughout. By the end of the season they had caught the control up, and then passed it. The mechanism is documented rather than asserted: microscopy confirms the root colonisation, and excavation shows the broad even root system that makes infrequent deep watering survivable.
Conventional14 litres every day, by trickle irrigation
5,110 L / tree / year
Zander15 litres every 15 days, by bowser
360 L / tree / year
92.8%
Less irrigation water than the conventional row
6×
More saline ground under the treated trees
475M L
Saved per 100,000 trees, every year
Evidence
What came out of the ground.
T₀I₁ — no Zander
Mean root length 19 cm
T₂I₂ — Organic + mycorrhiza
Mean root length 34 cm
Bouarfa, Morocco / with UNIDO
Aleppo pine, nine weeks after planting.
Same species, same desert ground, same nine weeks. The Moroccan government and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation had earmarked four areas of over a million hectares each for forestry; the binding constraints were water and the total absence of organic matter. Those running the judged the increment equal to two years’ growth.
Control
Zander
Mindanao, Philippines / with Fresh Studios
Bananas, and a signboard.
No chemical fertiliser on either plot. The bagged bunches on the treated side are the commercial point — the were not yet carrying fruit worth protecting.
DAP control
Humate only
Kenya / 2024
Germination: one in ten, against ten in ten.
Capsicum under glass. The control had di-ammonium phosphate at the recommended rate; the other plot had nothing but the . No conditioner, no mycorrhiza.
Al Jouf, Saudi Arabia / with JADCO
Second-year olives, in the Arabian desert.
Two litres of conditioner per plant and a dip of mycorrhiza. The water arrives clean from the Jordanian mountains and picks up its crossing a desert that was once sea bed. is jointly authored with the farm’s own engineers.
In practice
Where it is used, and how.
If you arrived with a problem rather than a crop, start with .
Plantations and forestry
Olive, avocado, mango, banana, date palm, pine. One treatment in the life of the tree, and far fewer casualties in the first two summers — which is where the money goes.
Cereals and field crops
Barley and oats returned a twelve per cent improvement over conventional, with no chemical fertiliser and no irrigation. A PVA seed coating lets the spore travel dry through an ordinary tractor seeder.
Vegetables and glasshouse
Tomato, pepper, chilli, cucurbit, onion, celery, flower crops. Dip the transplant, then spray three times through the season.
Golf and amenity turf
A permanent green sward in a hot country, with no drip-feeding after the first six weeks. Jumeirah Golf Estates in Dubai is a Zander-treated course.
Decontamination
More than ninety-nine per cent of dissolved heavy metal captured out of solution. Used on radioactivity at Chernobyl, on PAHs and PCBs, and to turn oily drill cuttings back into soil in twelve weeks.
Saline and degraded ground
Land written off as unfarmable. The conditioner buffers salt for at least nine years — long enough to get a plantation away.
Our position
A soil amendment is an easy thing to oversell.
So it is worth being plain about the ninety-three per cent. Granules do not save water. What the conditioner and the fungus do is build a root system broad enough and deep enough that a tree can survive fifteen litres a fortnight instead of fourteen litres a day. The honest claim is that the product makes a low-water regime survivable — and that regime uses about a tenth of the water.
And was one site, over one season. We stand by the figure recorded there. We do not promise its exact replication on your soil. What we will commit to, in a supervised local trial, is a defensible reduction of fifty to seventy-five per cent — provided we supervise the initial planting and the irrigation protocol, with the data collection thereafter in your hands, ideally a local university’s.
Which is why we propose trials rather than purchase orders. A demonstration plot uses trees you are planting anyway, costs very little, is supervised by your own people, and settles the question on your own ground inside a single season. , including the one incompatibility that matters.
Footprint
Where it has been in the ground.
Trials, plantings and commercial supply, from the Arabian Peninsula to East Africa and the Mediterranean.
- Al Jouf, Saudi ArabiaOlive, alfalfa — jointly documented trial
- Bouarfa, MoroccoAleppo pine, with UNIDO
- Mindanao, PhilippinesBanana, commercial plantation
- Al Ain, United Arab Emirates300 trees, municipal supervision
- Al Foah, United Arab EmiratesDate palm
- Jumeirah Golf Estates, DubaiAmenity turf
- KenyaGlasshouse capsicum and tomato, 2024
- KuwaitField trials
- LibyaAnti-desertification
- Southern SpainAvocado, mango
- Coventry University, UKSalinity trial
- Chernobyl, UkraineContainment bunds
Next step
Propose a trial.
A demonstration plot on your own ground, supervised by your own agronomists, measuring water used per surviving tree. It uses planting you are doing anyway, and it answers the question in one season.
We will supervise the initial planting and the irrigation protocol. Everything after that is yours to record.
Zander Corporation Ltd · Mells, Somerset, United Kingdom