Fertilizer Is Too Important to Ignore

Before we get into fertilizer, agriculture, carbon, water or any of the other systems Reform Bio is focused on, I'm going to ask you to embrace three first principles.

They are simple and personal. These principles shape how I think about what we are building.

If you can embrace those three ideas, the rest of this is simple.

Now look at fertilizer through that lens.

Fertilizer is one of the most important technologies humanity has ever developed. Billions of people are alive because we learned to give crops the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium they need. Modern agriculture does not exist at its current scale without it.

Every one of those roads leads to the same place. Fertilizer is too important to ignore. We are not here because fertilizer failed. We are here because it succeeded, and the next generation can be better.

Preserve life

Nutrients belong in the field.

A nutrient that leaves the root zone is more than an environmental problem. It harms the balance of life.

Across major cereal crops, decades of research show the crop typically recovers only 30 to 50 percent of the nitrogen applied. The rest is not automatically pollution; some stays in the soil for later. But large amounts are lost to volatilization, leaching, runoff and denitrification.

Science keeps improving how we make nitrogen fertlizer: cleaner ammonia, better inhibitors, precision application, even microbes that fix nitrogen in the root zone. All of these technologies are important, but nearly every form of synthetic nitrogen can still become nitrate and move with water. Ammonia can still volatilize. Saturated soils can still turn nitrogen into nitrous oxide.

The stakes are not abstract. Nitrate in drinking water is linked to certain cancers and birth defects. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

So the questions worth asking are about what happens next. Can we hold nutrients where roots can reach them? Can release match crop demand? Can we protect nutrients through the weeks when the plant does not need them yet?

At Reform Bio, we think fertilizer should be designed around those questions.

We are wasting what we cannot replace.

Phosphorus has bothered me since the earliest days of thinking about Reform Bio.

Every living thing needs it, and there is no substitute for it in food production. We cannot pull it from the atmosphere the way we fix nitrogen. Every pound entering the food system comes from phosphorus that already exists on this planet, and our system for using it is remarkably inefficient. Global phosphorus analyses suggest only 10 to 20 percent of the phosphorus entering agriculture ends up in the food people eat. The rest accumulates in soils, disappears into processing losses or moves into places where it shouldn't be.

Phosphate leaves the field the same way nitrate does, into streams, rivers, lakes and the ocean. Together, nitrogen and phosphorus feed algae blooms whose decay strips oxygen from the water. Each summer, nutrients from the Mississippi basin create a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that averages more than 5,000 square miles, roughly the size of Connecticut, with too little oxygen for most marine life.

I don't want to paint a picture of a civilization with a phosphorus expiration date. But whether known reserves last eighty years or three hundred, wasting a crucial and irreplaceable resource is the opposite of preserving life. Every efficiency buys humanity time. Every pound recovered from manure or food waste can re-enter the food system. Every pound kept out of a river stays closer to where it can be productive.

That is resilience.

Build on, boldly

Farmers are not the problem.

I grew up in agriculture. I have farmed. I have sold seed. I have sat across the table from farmers deciding where they can spend another dollar and where they cannot.

Farmers do not wake up hoping fertilizer ends up in a river. They do not benefit when nitrogen leaves their fields. They do not enjoy watching prices move because of a war or an energy crisis on the other side of the world. They are making decisions inside the system available to them.

The next generation of agricultural technology has to perform for the farmer first. It has to make agronomic sense and economic sense. It should work with the infrastructure, equipment and logistics already surrounding the farm. The best environmental technology in the world stays a science experiment if farmers cannot afford to use it.

Waste is a resource to build with.

This idea sits at the heart of Reform Bio.

Agriculture, forestry, livestock and food manufacturing generate enormous quantities of residual material. Wood chips, bark, sawdust, crop residues, oat hulls, manure, food-processing byproducts. They’re called waste or residuals because their original process is finished with them.

Wood industries alone generate on the order of 230 million dry metric tons of residual material a year. When we look at a pile of sawdust, we do not see a disposal problem. We see carbon, energy and the raw material for a fertilizer platform.

Manure tells the same story. It is full of valuable nutrients, but rarely in the ratios or forms a crop needs, and rarely in the right place at the right time.

What if we could change that? A forestry residual becomes engineered carbon. A processing byproduct becomes feedstock. Nutrients recovered from manure become a predictable fertilizer product. Something once treated as a cost becomes the start of another industry's supply chain. That is circularity worth pursuing, because the economics work.

Carbon needs a job to build in agriculture.

This is what first fascinated me about biochar.

Biochar can hold carbon for centuries, and we need durable ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. But I have never believed the winning future for biochar is asking the world to make black carbon and bury it only to gain carbon credits. A technology becomes powerful when it becomes useful.

Carbon needs a job. Agriculture gives it one.

At Reform Bio, we engineer carbon to act as a nutrient delivery chassis for our fertilizers. Instead of asking a farmer to buy biochar because sequestration is good for the planet, we put carbon inside a product the farmer already needs. That is a very different proposition.

The climate stakes are enormous. The global agrifood system produces roughly a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, and agriculture is the dominant human source of nitrous oxide. No single product solves that. But a value chain and products that connect them is incredibly valuable. Residual biomass becomes stable carbon. That carbon carries nutrients that stay useful longer, made near the farm that uses them. One physical system starts solving problems that used to live in separate conversations.

Build localized infrastructure.

For most of the last century, industrial efficiency meant scale and centralization. Build a bigger factory and ship your product farther. That model built a global agricultural system that depends on supply chains more fragile than they look.

Nitrogen and phosphate production track energy markets. Phosphate reserves sit in a handful of countries. Fertilizer prices move on wars, sanctions, shipping interruptions and natural gas prices set thousands of miles from any field. Farmers cannot control those things. Over time, we can build a system less exposed to these risks.

Agriculture is inherently regional. Feedstocks, crops, soils, weather, water and nutrient challenges are all regional. The next generation of agricultural manufacturing should take advantage of that. Put production near the biomass, near the nutrient sources and near the farmer who needs the product.

The science can travel. The platform can travel. The solution should localize. A Reform Bio facility in Minnesota will look different from one in Brazil, but the science underneath is the same. That is how we shorten supply chains without retreating from a global economy. It also puts a new generation of manufacturing jobs in the places that grow our food, manage our forests and produce our energy. Those communities should get to make the technologies of the future, not just supply the raw materials for them.

Dream big

Fertilizer is where we start. It is not where we stop.

Nitrogen Reformed™ is our first major product. It will not be our last.

We see a future with enhanced-efficiency nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, micronutrients and combinations engineered around different crops and growing systems. Then biology: fungi, microbes and other living technologies that perform better when we can protect them, carry them and place them where they need to be.

We see a future built on how chemistry, biology, carbon, agronomy and materials science work together, not on a synthetic-versus-biological debate.

Dream big enough, and success is not measured only in tons of fertilizer sold.

Twenty years from now, I want to see nitrate and phosphorus loss curves bending downward across entire agricultural regions. I want Reform Bio helping conserve finite phosphorus reserves and putting millions of metric tons of carbon to productive use. I want our technologies driving meaningful reductions in agricultural nitrous oxide. I want regional plants employing hundreds, eventually thousands, of people while rebuilding resilient supply chains closer to the communities they serve.

And fertilizer is only the beginning. Our production facilities will make engineered carbon first, and over time bio-oils, renewable energy and, if we can make the economics work, low-carbon fuels like sustainable aviation fuel. We will not get every bet right. But if twenty years from now we are still building only the products we can imagine today, we did not dream big enough.

Here's to the people willing to try.

Changing something as established as fertilizer requires a certain kind of person.

A scientist willing to question what everyone else assumes. A farmer willing to put something new on the acres that pay the bills. An engineer willing to build equipment that does not exist yet. A manufacturing partner willing to rethink what a waste stream can become. An investor willing to see an industry before it fully exists. A team willing to spend days making fertilizer in five-gallon buckets, cement mixers, tin trays and ovens, because that is what it takes to produce the next batch and learn something. Those bucket days are mostly behind us. The willingness is not.

And people willing to look at the world around them and ask:

Maybe believing we can change these systems is a little crazy.

Good.

We will not do it alone. It will take farmers, scientists, universities, retailers, manufacturers, forestry and food companies, energy producers, governments, investors and people building technologies we have not met yet.

We need to help build a system that works.

A system that keeps nutrients where they belong.

A system that values life.

A system that puts carbon to productive work.

A system that builds on everything agriculture has already accomplished and boldly improves what comes next.

I told my father a long time ago that if you're going to dream, dream big. I'm not interested in changing that advice now. But we are not just dreaming. There is a better system to build. We are getting to work.

Join us.