Hydrobio3 min read
KUZOG named an Open Carca 2025 laureate
Carcassonne Agglo has named KUZOG a laureate of Open Carca 2025 for Hydrobio, a soil amendment built for regions living with water restrictions.
Carcassonne Agglo has named KUZOG a laureate of Open Carca 2025. The entry was Hydrobio, our soil amendment.
What Open Carca is
Open Carca is the entrepreneurial competition run by Carcassonne Agglo with the local business-creation and business-support organisations. It is open to anyone: a project that has not been incorporated yet, a student, an employee changing careers, an association, or a company already trading. Entries are split into two tracks — Émergence for projects that are not yet companies, Développement for businesses already operating.
The format is two days at Carcassonne of workshops and working sessions with entrepreneurs, coaches and experts, closing with pitches in front of a jury. It is a regional competition rather than a national one, and for a product like ours that is the interesting part.
Why a jury in the Aude asks better questions
The Aude is a wine département on a Mediterranean coastal plain, and it spends a large part of the year under prefectural water-use restrictions. Alert levels are set watershed by watershed. When the alluvial water table drops, irrigation schedules and volumes are capped by decree. Nobody there needs to be persuaded that water is the binding constraint on agriculture; they already farm around it.
A grower who has lived through three restricted summers does not ask whether soil water matters. They ask how long the effect lasts.
That changes the questions you get. Elsewhere the first question is market size. In Carcassonne it is what happens on ground that has been farmed hard for a century, in a year with no spring rain, and whether the effect is still measurable in the third season.
What we entered
Hydrobio is a hybrid mineral-biological amendment. A micronised clay-based mineral matrix holds water and nutrients in the root zone; a living mycorrhizal consortium extends the reach of the root system beyond it. The minerals act as a physical scaffold for the fungi, which is why root colonisation is faster and why the effect is designed to persist rather than wash out.
It is applied once, at soil preparation — spreading, then light surface incorporation — and is designed to work for three to five years instead of being reapplied every season. Which recipe goes onto which parcel is not a catalogue choice. HydrobioFormul, our machine-learning formulation engine, calculates the composition and the per-hectare dose from that parcel’s soil analysis, its crop, and its climate exposure.
+47%
Water retention, measured on sandy soils
+18.7%
Yield against an untreated control on the same soil
Sandy and degraded soils are where a mineral matrix has the most to hold on to, which is also where the Mediterranean south of France has the most to gain. That overlap is the whole reason we entered a competition in the Aude rather than a larger one somewhere else.
What it enables next
An award is not a field trial. What Open Carca gives us is a way into the Occitanie ecosystem: the agglomeration’s economic-development team, and the local support network it works with — R.MINE among them, already one of our partners. Both matter when the next task is finding pilot parcels and the growers willing to host them.
That is the task. Hydrobio’s numbers rest on controlled trials, and controlled trials are where a soil product starts, not where it finishes. They have to be repeated on working farms, on soils we did not select, across enough seasons to test whether the three-to-five-year figure holds outside a trial plot. Wider French commercialisation follows EU 2019/1009 homologation, which is in preparation. Occitanie is where the evidence should come from, because Occitanie is where the problem is worst.