News & Trends

Renewable agriculture: making deserts fertile

29.04.2025 2 min

The future will be hotter, the soils drier. The magic phrase here is renewable agriculture. Its aim is to make soils healthier and more fertile – and it is even making barren deserts green. For example, with Liquid Natural Clay.

Healing damaged soils: with this approach, renewable agriculture is revolutionizing farming. By making arid land economically viable, it is bringing food security to regions most affected by climate change.

A variety of traditional methods are helping to make soils fertile again. Increased biodiversity provides more nutrients. A well thought-out crop rotation brings soils into balance; in combination with integrated livestock farming, this creates a healthy ecosystem. But all this requires a great deal of time and water, both of which are scarce commodities in light of increasing desertification. This is where nanoclay comes in.

Ancient knowledge meets modern engineering

The knowledge that clay soils are more fertile than sand is nothing new. Farmers have been mixing clay into their soils for thousands of years. This is, however, very labour-intensive and complex: too much clay does harm; too little does no good. One solution: Liquid Natural Clay (LNC).

The technology from Norwegian company Desert Control has been transforming sandy deserts into fertile farmland since 2007 – and it does so in just a few hours. LNC is a liquid made from natural minerals, tiny clay particles and water. The clay particles bind to the surface of the sand particles, ensuring that grains of sand in the ground store water. This lowers water consumption by up to 50 percent and increases harvests by up to 62 percent. From Dubai to Arizona, LNC has already breathed life into desert soils – and the future of this natural technology looks blooming, to say the least.