LOREM IPSUM ODOR AMET, CONSECTETUER ADIPISCING

In a small dry corner of England, Aquagrain is creating a super-absorbent biodegradable hydrogel that could help crops grow in degraded lands. Aquagrain is a finalist for the 2024 Food Planet Prize.

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GITEGA, Burundi -

In one of the smallest units in a sprawling industrial estate in the tiny English village of Needham Market, a scientist has been painstakingly refining a soil improving product. Made using animal carcasses, this hydrogel can hold enough water to transform degraded land into fertile soil. It may seem like the stuff of sci-fi, but Dr. Arjomand Ghareghani, the inventor of Aquagrain, has patented a technology that combines waste from abattoirs and farms with a super-absorbent hydrocarbon that acts as a reservoir for plants. It’s a product that could reduce the use of inorganic fertilizer and make it possible to grow food on parts of the planet that long ago became too dry and depleted to support traditional agriculture.

On a cold January day, Dr. Ghareghani meets me at the unit where he has been developing his patented technology. There’s no desert in England, but there are towns here in the country’s east that get less rain than arid Andalucia. The climate and chalky earth make the soil dry and sandy—the perfect place to test a polymer that addresses desertification. One area farmer who used Aquagrain during company trials immediately requested 35 tons for his 70 hectares of cereal fields. He described the difference between the field strips sowed with Aquagrain and those that weren’t as “like walking across a black and white zebra crossing”.

Can Aquagrain provide a viable solution to desertification?

Desertification, or the degradation of drylands by unsustainable farming and overgrazing, ranks together with climate change and biodiversity loss among the greatest threats to the planet. It’s not necessarily a new problem – desertification has claimed multiple civilizations in human history, as far back as the Akkadians of Mesopotamia, who forged the world’s first empire more than 4,300 years ago only to disappear, researchers believe, during a 300-year drought that destroyed the farmlands they relied on to grow wheat and barley. Today, multiple factors have led to the increasing desertification of large farmland areas, from synthetic fertilizers to higher global temperatures and the growing frequency of droughts, with a catastrophic effect on food production. It has been estimated that 23 hectares of land are lost worldwide to land degradation every minute (more than the EU average farm size of nearly 17 hectares). That’s 12 million hectares per year.

But desertification is reversible. Some of the leading human causes of desertification are the practices and products used by farmers, including the heavy use of machinery, tillage, and chemicals, which can affect the structure of soil and its water content​​​​. Aquagrain acts as a water-holding sponge – a jelly-like substance filled with moisture and food that remains in the soil long enough for crops to grow, stopping nutrients from leaching out of the soil.

Arjomand Ghareghani (Scientist and Creator of Aquagrain) at the Aquagrain Laboratory.

There’s just one problem: the production capacity at the industrial estate is only one ton per month. The next challenge for Dr. Ghareghani and Aquagrain is scaling up its production, an expensive process requiring significant investment. At the industrial estate, nothing suggests that this small unit could hold the key to turning the parched ground into fertile land. To the left is a shuttered flooring company. A car mechanic on the other side waves as Dr. Ghareghani turns the key to an unmarked white wooden door. Inside are three small, connected rooms: a kitchen, a lab, and an office. A long, complicated chemical equation is written across the whiteboard on one kitchen wall. Behind it, in the lab area, the counters are spectacularly clean, covered in glass test tubes, goggles, scales, and thermometers. Underneath the stainless steel unit, however, is a dirty brown bucket: a clue to the grislier side of the work. Behind a glass screen, in an adjoining unit, a small warehouse has been turned into a production lab with machinery used to vacuum dry the animal protein and turn it into the brown pellets that farmers can sow on their land. Here, Dr. Ghareghani explains he is free to work on developing the product in peace. It took him just three years to invent Aquagrain. That was almost ten years ago.

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