By James Thomas, CEO, Desert Control — April 23, 2026
One year ago today, I became CEO of Desert Control. I want to mark this anniversary with a real account of what this past year has looked like: what we found, what broke, what we built, and why I believe the work we’ve done since April 2025 has set us up for what matters most right now.
The world’s water crisis has grown more urgent
I’ll start with the backdrop, because it’s impossible to separate the work we’re doing from the world we’re doing it in.
In January 2026, UN researchers declared that the planet has moved beyond a water crisis and into a state of global water bankruptcy. That same month, The Los Angeles Times reported that Colorado River negotiations were stalling, putting water supplies across California and several other states at serious risk.
This is the world Desert Control operates in. We make Liquid Natural Clay (LNC) a technology that helps soil hold water like a sponge, reducing irrigation needs by over 25%, improving soil health, and extending the productive life of land that would otherwise degrade. The need for what we do has never been more urgent. That’s not marketing. It’s just the reality of where we are right now.
The question for me, stepping into this role in April 2025, was not whether LNC offered prospective customers an effective tool to help mitigate this crisis. Clearly, it did. The question was whether we were organized, focused, and operationally able to deliver it at the scale the world needs.
The honest answer, when I arrived, was: not yet.
What I found and the hard choices that followed
Desert Control has always had a brilliant technology and a team that believed deeply in the mission. For most of its history, it has been trying to pursue too many end markets, too many geographies, with too few people and processes.
My first job was to focus the Company.
We made the decision to concentrate our commercial energy on two segments, both in the American Southwest, where we have the clearest near-term path to value: permanent crops and golf/turf. California alone has hundreds of golf courses, more than 200 million fruit and nut trees, and some of the most severe water shortages of any agricultural region in the world. We have a $5B+ addressable market in our American backyard. I quickly decided this is where we needed to put our energy.
Focus sounds simple. It isn’t. It means saying no to things that feel promising, restructuring teams, and making some decisions that were genuinely painful.
One of those decisions was moving our R&D operations from Norway to the United States. Our team in Stavanger had been with this company through its earliest, hardest years. They developed a profound understanding of LNC that will help drive the future of the product. Making this decision was not taken lightly, and I want to say clearly: we would not be where we are without them. Ultimately, the right move for the company’s future was to be closer to our customers, our field environments, and our academic research partners in Arizona and California.
What we did to overcome challenges
Scaling an innovative, new product from small-scale to commercial application is rarely seamless. In Q2 2025, we discovered that two of our golf course customers had irrigation systems which demanded very tight tolerances
Rather than cower from this challenge, we address it head-on. The R&D, engineering, and field operations teams immediately coalesced. They ran trial and error experiments exhaustively, isolated root causes. We hired one of the world-leading academic research centers in clay and asked them to examine our results Their findings confirmed our internal findings that LNC did not directly cause any issues. Based on these all these efforts, we redesigned injection equipment and rewrote operating procedures. By Q3, we were back in the field with improved systems and processes.
Prospective customers are well aware of how we responded to these setbacks and view the company more favourably as a result. Their eyes are watching each new application of LNC. I have every confidence in this battle-tested process and team. As each new application succeeds, I expect our win rate of new business to rise.
What we proved
By the second half of 2025, the results started coming in.
Our client Woodland Hills Country Club realized combined water savings and incentive value exceeding $185,000 USD in H2 2025 alone. The superintendent has reported better turf quality with roughly 28% less water irrigation than the prior 5-year average. Considering there are more than 35 golf courses in the LA Department of Water and Power service area, managing close to 1,000 acres combined, and that water costs are only going up, Woodland Hills’ results are proof of enormous replication potential.
We launched our first almond pilot in California, the largest tree crop in the state, with over 1.4 million acres and more than $1 billion in annual irrigation costs. We look forward to sharing the data at a later date.
Our partnership with Oasis Date, the world’s largest organic Medjool date grower, expanded to a full commercial-scale yield improvement trial in collaboration with the University of Arizona. That research will produce data that validates not just water savings but also yield – a metric of utmost concern for our agricultural customers.
In the Middle East, our licensed partners Soyl and Saudi Desert Control continued to build commercial momentum and deepen relationships with government bodies that I believe will lead to large-scale awards in the coming years.
Finally, we completed a NOK 75 million rights issue, oversubscribed by 41%, which gives us the runway to execute the commercial plan we’ve built.
Where we’re going
2026 is not a year of setup. It’s a year of delivery.
We recently announced successful completion of a full commercial application of LNC at Berkeley Country Club. The environmentally focused membership of this golf course looks forward to years of water savings as a result.
Our next-generation production unit, which will dramatically increase our application efficiency, is concluding production at our contract manufacturer and should go into the field this spring. Our sales team is gelling and as a result, a record number of potential commercial customers are trialling LNC. In the first half of the year, we expect 26 pilots which compares to seven completed in all of 2025.
The projected revenue target for 2026 is $2–3 million USD, a significant multiple of the company’s combined revenues for 2024 and 2025.
We have announced plans for a capital raise of approximately $15M which should allow us on the deliver on the rapid rise in customer interest and position the company to further penetrate the American Southwest market.
We have matured dramatically over the past year. We know which markets we’re in and why. We know how to deploy LNC precisely and safely. We know what our customers need. We’ve spent the last twelve months building a team in the United States that is close to the ground literally and figuratively.
A word about the team
This is a small company taking on a very large problem. The people who choose to work here do it because they think it matters. I think it matters too. I’m grateful every day for the team we have, and for the shareholders who have stayed with us through a year that wasn’t always easy to watch.
We’re ready for what comes next.
James