When the first white settlers arrived on the American continent and met the Native Americans. The new settlers noticed that the skin of the Indians looked young, taut and vital, and that their overall appearance did not correspond to their actual age.

The settlers were interested in the phenomenon and asked the locals for the “secret” to maintaining a youthful appearance. The answer they received surprised them greatly. The locals told the settlers that they were using “drops of liquid gold”. The settlers who did not understand the meaning of this asked the locals to show them where this “gold” was. When the settlers showed them the jojoba plants and how they crush the seeds and apply them to the skin, there was a degree of disappointment among the settlers who probably expected to find rivers of gold…

The jojoba plant, which originates in the deserts of Mexico and Arizona and grows there naturally, was forgotten for several hundred years and returned to the pages of history in the 1980s when an article appeared in a financial newspaper in the USA about the jojoba plant, which is described there as the “next thing” in the world and promises great wealth to those who grow it him.

The article led to a large wave of plantings in the US deserts, but what the article did not tell is that the jojoba plant is a stubborn plant that is not at all easy to grow and also the process of extracting the oil from it is complex. Everyone who planted jojoba plantations found this out the hard way and most of the plantations were abandoned and uprooted, simply because they were unable to get what they wanted from the plant.

In the 1980s, the Israeli “Dalek” company made the jojoba plant “Alia” to Israel in order to extract the oil as an additive to fuels. Even at the Delek company, like the American growers, there was a failure in cultivation and the plantations were sold to Kibbutz Hatzeris in the Negev, at a nominal price.

The first plantations were planted in the Kibbutz Hatzerim in 1990 and a small factory was established to extract the oil. A lot of agricultural and agrotechnical knowledge has been accumulated in Kibbutz Hatzerim where the “Netafim” company has been operating since 1965 and in the kibbutz. The combination of the desert climate that suits the plant like a glove and the extensive agricultural knowledge accumulated in the kibbutz helped acclimatize the jojoba plants and extract oil from them.

Since then, the Jojoba Hatzerim branch has been a leader in the global jojoba field with a series of breakthroughs in the discovery of new varieties, maximizing the plant’s capabilities through a sophisticated irrigation and fertilization system, a mechanical collection system that does not require much manpower, and a state-of-the-art factory for extracting the oil in a special process adapted to the specific jojoba seeds.

Thanks to these things, Kibbutz Hatzrim is a major player in the global cosmetics market and the oil is sold in many countries around the world.