Biocarbon and the Fertilizer Crisis: A Founder's Perspective on Resilience
There is a growing issue in the global economy that I believe is not getting nearly enough attention, and it is not the one you might expect from someone building an energy company.
It is fertilizer.
The moment this really clicked for me was while reading an FT article on the growing fertilizer disruption tied to the Strait of Hormuz. What struck me was not just the price spikes, it was the realization that there are strategic oil reserves around the world, but virtually no strategic fertilizer reserves. We have built a global food system dependent on continuous flows of inputs through a handful of geopolitical chokepoints, with very little redundancy if those systems fail.
Modern agriculture depends heavily on synthetic inputs, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, to sustain the yields that feed billions of people. But the system behind those inputs is becoming structurally fragile in ways that most people have not fully realized. Roughly 70–80% of ammonia production, the foundation of nitrogen fertilizer, is directly tied to natural gas. Decades of intensive farming have steadily degraded soil quality, meaning farmers must apply more fertilizer each year simply to maintain the same yields.
We are watching the consequences of that dependency unfold in real time.
A survey of more than 5,700 U.S. farmers conducted by the American Farm Bureau Federation in April 2026 found that 70% cannot afford to purchase all the fertilizer they need for this growing season. These are not marginal farmers operating on thin soil; these are the core of American agricultural production, and nearly six in ten say their financial situation has worsened over the past year, with no expectation of improvement.
This is not a price shock. It is a structural exposure playing out in real time.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has made that exposure impossible to ignore. According to FAO and multiple market analyses, approximately one-third of globally traded fertilizer transits through the Strait, including 36% of urea and 29% of ammonia, the two most critical nitrogen inputs for crop production. Within weeks of the disruption, some nitrogen fertilizer prices increased by more than 35%. Over a million metric tons of fertilizer cargo are physically stranded in the Gulf right now. And there are no strategic fertilizer reserves, unlike oil; no government has stockpiled the inputs that farmers need to plant a crop.
I kept coming back to the same uncomfortable realization when looking at this: we have optimized for efficiency at the expense of redundancy. We built a system in which critical agricultural inputs are produced in a handful of geopolitically exposed regions, shipped through a small number of maritime chokepoints, and then applied to local soils that are increasingly unable to retain them. The response to soil degradation has largely been to apply even more fertilizer, which only deepens the dependency on distant supply chains.
That is not a supply problem. It is a design problem.
During a recent visit to my community in rural Montana, I had several conversations with ranchers and farmers that stayed with me long after I left. The concern was not theoretical to them; it was immediate. They talked about fertilizer prices rising to levels that could materially affect whether operations remained profitable, and about growing fears that supply might not be available when needed. What struck me most was hearing how many felt increasingly exposed to forces completely outside their control, global supply chains, geopolitics, and input markets that directly determine whether they can operate sustainably in the coming years.
Solving this requires more than increasing fertilizer production or diversifying trade routes. It requires improving how soils function, so they need less input to begin with.
This is where biocarbon plays an important and underappreciated role.
Biocarbon, produced through pyrolysis, the thermal conversion of organic material in an oxygen-limited environment, is not a fertilizer replacement. It changes how fertilizers behave once they are in the ground. Applied to soil, biochar improves nutrient retention, increases water-holding capacity by up to 30% depending on soil type, supports microbial activity, and rebuilds soil structure over time. Research on nitrogen-intensive crops has shown that a 15% reduction in nitrogen fertilizer, combined with biochar application, can increase spring wheat yields by up to 25% while reducing nitrogen loss by nearly half. These are not lab projections; they are field results across multiple crop cycles and soil types.
In simple terms, farmers can do more with less. And right now, doing more with less is not an aspiration. It is a necessity.
My company, Kore Infrastructure, has a technology platform specifically designed to convert landfill-diverted organics, hazardous forest biomass, agricultural residues, and other underutilized waste streams into both dispatchable energy and high-quality biocarbon through a non-combustion pyrolysis process. What makes this especially compelling is that we are taking low-value or costly waste materials and transforming them into a stable carbon product that can improve soil performance, reduce fertilizer dependency, and create localized agricultural resilience while simultaneously addressing waste and wildfire mitigation challenges.
Biocarbon is also far more versatile than most people realize. While agriculture may become one of its most important applications, the material – for agricultural purposes typically referred to as biochar - has relevance across multiple industries, from soil enhancement and fertilizer efficiency to carbon removal, water filtration, construction materials, environmental remediation, and even industrial carbon inputs. That versatility matters because it creates multiple demand pathways around a single locally produced resource, strengthening the economics while increasing resilience across sectors.
What makes biocarbon particularly compelling as a strategic response to this moment is the shift it enables, from global dependency to local production.
The feedstocks for biocarbon are not scarce or geopolitically exposed. They are already around us. According to the DOE's 2023 Billion-Ton Report, the United States has the potential to produce between 1.1 and 1.5 billion dry tons of biomass annually from agricultural residues, forestry waste, municipal solid waste, and other organic streams, enough to cover roughly 15% of the country's total energy needs. A meaningful subset of that material, approximately 350 million tons per year, is currently available but unused: landfill-diverted organics, hazardous forest fuels, and agricultural residues that are often burned in the open or left to decompose. These are not scarce inputs. They are local liabilities waiting to be converted into something useful.
Through pyrolysis, waste becomes infrastructure. Soil becomes more productive. And agriculture becomes less dependent on markets that can be shut off by geopolitical events thousands of miles away.
That shift matters more than it might seem in a stable environment. Because the fertilizer challenge we are facing now is not just economic, it is strategic. It touches food security, national resilience, and the long-term stability of systems that billions of people depend on. When the American Farm Bureau Federation’s chief economist says farmers are responding by reducing application rates, shifting crop acres, or simply absorbing losses they cannot afford, the downstream risk is lower yields, higher food prices, and fewer farmers able to survive the season. That is not a supply chain story. That is a food security story.
I believe solutions that are local, modular, and scalable will define the next generation of agricultural infrastructure, not because they are ideologically appealing, but because the alternative has proven too fragile.
Biocarbon is one of those solutions. It is one of the few pathways that simultaneously improves soil health, reduces fertilizer dependency, utilizes waste streams that would otherwise be liabilities, generates verifiable carbon removal, and strengthens agricultural resilience against exactly the kind of disruption we are seeing right now.
I am proud that Kore Infrastructure is building toward this. Not as a cleantech story, but as an economically attractive infrastructure solution. The kind that strengthens a system at its foundation rather than patching it at the edges.
The future of agriculture will not be defined by how much fertilizer the world can produce. It will be defined by how efficiently we can use it, how resilient our soils become, and how quickly we can reduce dependency on systems that were never designed to be this fragile.
Sources referenced in this piece: