There’s a moment from the show Shark Tank that has stayed with me for over a decade. A man named Johnny Georges stood before the investors, pitching his “Tree T-Pee”—a simple plastic cone that wraps around the base of a young tree. The numbers he presented were stark: an unprotected tree required 25,000 gallons of water per year to thrive, while a tree with his invention needed just 800. He was selling each unit for $4.50, making a dollar in profit.
When one of the “sharks” pushed him to raise his price, Georges looked genuinely bewildered. His response cut through the usual theater of business negotiations: “But you’re selling to farmers.”
The way he said it—not as a market demographic, but as people whose reality he intimately understood—was unforgettable. He knew their margins were thin, their work was hard, and their success was precarious. Another investor was so moved by this commitment that he made an offer without a counter. Georges’s stance was a vivid reminder of what it means to build something with the end-user’s world held firmly in mind.
That moment is a touchstone for me in my work with biochar. The conversation in our industry is often dominated by carbon credits, monetization strategies, and revenue streams derived from sequestration. But I came to this work from the farm, not the financial market, and that origin defines the lens through which I see everything. It presents us with two fundamentally different perspectives.
The first perspective sees carbon as the product. It begins with the goal of CO₂ removal. From this viewpoint, soil becomes a storage vessel and the farmer becomes a project implementer. The economics are structured around credit markets and compliance frameworks, where the primary client is often the buyer of the carbon credit.
The second perspective sees integrated resilience as the product. It begins not just with the farmer’s reality, but with the reality of the living landscape—a system where human agriculture and ecosystem health are inextricably linked. It acknowledges that climate change doesn’t just make farming harder; it degrades the very ecological functions that support all life. Seen through this lens, biochar is not a carbon sequestration product first. Biochar is a tool for systemic resilience. It is about improving soil health, water retention, and nutrient cycling for the benefit of both the crop and the broader ecosystem. Carbon removal becomes the neat and permanent co-benefit of a system designed to help both farmers succeed and the land beneath them recover.
I’ve watched agricultural innovations arrive with fanfare only to be abandoned in frustration. The research was sound, the presentations compelling. But somewhere between the lab and the field, a fatal disconnect became clear. The solution they came up with wasn’t built for the complex realities of a working landscape.
Perhaps that’s why Georges’s moment on screen remains so resonant. He could have captured more value. He could have optimized his profit margin. Instead, he held firm on what mattered to him, that is, keeping his product within reach of the people who needed it. Not because he was running a charity, but because he understood that real solutions have to work in the real world, for real people.
The biochar industry is still young enough to choose its path. We can still decide whether we are building for compliance or for crops, for financial engineering or for the fundamental health of the agricultural ecosystems that feed us.
Our challenge isn’t simply to prove that biochar can sequester carbon—it can. The more profound question is whether we can build an industry that does so in service of the living systems it affects, from the farmer in the field to the soil food web beneath their feet.
And that distinction, as Johnny Georges understood, makes all the difference.
