They Found a Way to Make Fertilizer From Thin Air — and the World’s Farmers Are Running Out of Time

A Stanford startup is turning almond shells, water, and electricity into the future of food. The $150 billion fertilizer industry hasn’t seen this kind of challenge in over a century. Here’s why that matters — and why most people have never heard of it.

The world is not running out of food because we lack land. It is not running out because farmers are lazy or governments aren’t spending enough. In many cases, it is running out — or teetering on the edge — because a bag of fertilizer costs too much, arrives too late, or never arrives at all.

That is the quiet crisis behind the louder one. And a small team of Stanford PhDs who started by testing solar-powered fertilizer systems on a single lemon tree in their backyard may have just cracked it.

The 100-Year-Old Problem Nobody Talks About

The Haber-Bosch process was invented in 1909. It is how the world has produced nitrogen fertilizer ever since — by combining atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen under extreme heat and pressure, almost always powered by natural gas. It is also how we feed roughly half the planet.

It is also one of the dirtiest industrial processes in human history.

Conventional fertilizer production and use accounts for roughly 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Haber-Bosch process alone consumes nearly 2% of the world’s total energy supply. And then, after all that, 60 to 70% of the nitrogen applied to crops is lost — evaporating into the atmosphere, leaching into waterways, poisoning ecosystems.

The math is brutal: we are burning enormous quantities of fossil fuels to produce a product that is mostly wasted.

But the deeper problem is not the waste. It is the access.

Most U.S. ammonia is co-produced alongside natural gas refineries concentrated on the Gulf Coast, then shipped roughly 2,000 miles by rail before reaching farmers in the West. In sub-Saharan Africa, fertilizer is imported, expensive, and chronically unavailable — with prices projected to surge 31% in 2026, according to the World Bank. In Senegal. In Kenya. In countries where agriculture is not a lifestyle choice but a matter of survival.

The fertilizer supply chain was built for industrial commodity markets. It was never designed with small farmers in mind.

Three PhDs, a Lemon Tree, and a $5,000 Grant

Nicolas Pinkowski, Joshua McEnaney, and Jay Schwalbe were Stanford graduate students when they started building prototype fertilizer systems in their shared home. Their first testbed was a single lemon tree. Their first funding was a $5,000 CalTech grant.

Today, the company they founded in 2018 — Nitricity — has raised over $90 million, has a production pipeline exceeding $150 million, and has its flagship commercial facility coming online in California this year, with every ton of production already sold out through 2028.

The founders weren’t just chasing a climate prize. They were chasing a problem they saw with their own eyes.

A trip to Senegal had shown them what fertilizer inaccessibility looks like in practice: communities that wanted to grow more food, had the land to do it, and were blocked by a supply chain that had no interest in reaching them.

The question they came home asking was not “how do we reduce emissions?” It was: “What if you could make fertilizer wherever you are, with what you already have?”

The Science: Lightning in a Bottle — Literally

Here is the part that sounds like science fiction.

During a lightning storm, electrical discharges split nitrogen molecules from the air and combine them with oxygen to form nitrates that fall with rain and fertilize the soil. It is nature’s own fertilizer system — responsible for about 1% of total global nitrogen fertilizer production. It just isn’t predictable or scalable enough to rely on.

Nitricity scaled it.

Their process uses plasma — high-energy electrons that selectively activate nitrogen molecules at much lower temperatures than Haber-Bosch requires — to produce nitric acid from air and water, using electricity as the only energy input. That acid is then neutralized with minerals to produce calcium nitrate or potassium nitrate, both of which can flow directly through irrigation lines.

The flagship product is called Ash Tea — a liquid organic nitrogen fertilizer brewed from upcycled almond shells, air, water, and renewable power. It is reddish-orange, odor-free, pathogen-free, free of animal products, and compatible with modern drip irrigation without clogging emitters.

Field trials have shown yield increases of up to 30%. Early-season plant growth is visibly accelerated. And unlike fish emulsions, soy hydrolysates, or chicken manure — the main alternatives in the organic market — it does not smell, does not carry contamination risk, and does not require special handling.

Farmers are not buying this because it is green. They are buying it because it works.

A Factory in Delhi — and a Blueprint for the World

In September 2025, Nitricity broke ground on its first commercial-scale production facility in Delhi, California — in the heart of Merced County, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world.

The numbers are striking. The Delhi plant represents a hundredfold increase in Nitricity’s production capacity over its pilot facility in Fremont. The $10 million project is backed by climate investors Elemental Impact and Trellis Climate, with output already fully committed under binding agreements with Central Valley organic growers through 2028. It will create more than 20 jobs in a county that badly needs them.

Backers of the wider company include Khosla Ventures, World Fund (Europe’s leading climate VC, making its first U.S. bet), and Chipotle’s Cultivate Next venture fund. The Series B round closed at $50 million in September 2025. Total capital raised: over $90 million.

The vision behind the facility design is deliberately different from the industry norm.

Nitricity is not building a single mega-factory. The company’s model calls for regional plants sized between 10,000 and 100,000 tons per year of liquid fertilizer — close enough to farming communities to keep transportation costs down, small enough to be financed without decades of operating history. In California, the raw material is almond shells. In Europe, the plan is to use olive oil waste and wood residue. The feedstock changes. The process stays the same.

The company’s Chief Commercial Officer Jayesh Goyal has said demand is overwhelming: “We’re just getting flooded with customers wanting this.”

Every ounce of what they currently produce is already spoken for.

The Harder Question: If the Solution Exists, Why Are Millions Still Hungry?

It would be easy to write this as a pure triumph story. It is not one yet.

Nitricity is currently focused on organic specialty crop farmers in California and the American West — growers of berries, spinach, parsley, and arugula who pay premium prices and have the irrigation infrastructure to use a liquid fertilizer. That market makes commercial sense. It is not Senegal.

The path from a startup proving its model in California to a technology that actually reaches subsistence farmers in West Africa runs through a long list of obstacles that have nothing to do with chemistry: access to cheap renewable electricity, local infrastructure for storage and distribution, financing mechanisms that work for small-scale operators, and governments that have historically struggled to move faster than the global commodity system.

Rocky Mountain Institute analysis identifies Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Namibia, Rwanda, and Lesotho as strong candidates for decentralized fertilizer production — high import costs, strong solar potential, real demand. But scaling in these markets requires aggregated demand, storage infrastructure, and fit-for-purpose finance. None of that is easy.

And the clock is moving. The World Bank projects fertilizer prices rising 31% in 2026, driven largely by urea cost increases compounded by Persian Gulf supply disruptions. Every price spike is a planting season missed somewhere, a yield reduced, a family that eats less.

Nitricity’s CEO Nicolas Pinkowski co-authored a piece in April 2026 arguing that the technology now exists to decouple fertilizer from oil and gas markets entirely. The technology does exist. The deployment gap — between what is proven and what is accessible — remains the defining challenge.

What This Actually Means

The fertilizer industry has not changed its fundamental production method in over 100 years. A process built for the industrial age — centralized, fossil-fuel-dependent, globally distributed — is being asked to feed a world of 8 billion people through compounding supply shocks, climate disruption, and geopolitical instability.

Nitricity did not set out to beat the commodity fertilizer market on its own terms. It set out to route around it — to make fertilizer production local, renewable, and tied to whatever agricultural waste happens to exist nearby.

That is a different kind of climate technology. Not one that asks farmers to change their behavior. One that removes the barrier in front of them.

The founders started with a lemon tree. They are now building a factory. The question — the one that the Senegal trip first asked — is whether the model scales fast enough to matter for the farmers who need it most.

The technology says yes. The rest is up to everyone else.