Three people, and a lake.

Zander Corporation Ltd was set up in 1992 by three people who saw the potential of what the Zander products had to offer, and how they could transform the traditional methods of growing crops in the light of the deleterious effects that chemical fertiliser is now having on soils all over the world.

Work carried out during the first years of the millennium showed that combinations of Zander products would let transplants establish in arid, desertified and saline substrata: the root fungus responding to climatic and root stress by supplying the plant with water and dissolved nutrients, and the conditioner buffering the salt that would otherwise stop it.

Since then the technology has gone into the ground in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Libya, Kenya, southern Spain and the Philippines — with UNIDO, with municipal authorities, with universities, and with some of the largest commercial growers in the arid world. The Al Jouf olive trial remains the most closely documented of them.

The material is dredged and dried in Eastern Europe, and the company works through partners across the Gulf and North Africa.