Arkansas Startup Turns Poultry Waste Into Carbon-Negative Fertilizer

Jody Hardin and Richard Ims, CEO and chief business officer at Carbon Chicken Project LLC, stand with their 4-pound bag of fertilizer at the company’s 11-acre innovation farm in Fayetteville. (Michael Woods)

Fayetteville-based Carbon Chicken Project LLC co-founders Jody Hardin and Richard Ims hope to make poultry farming more sustainable by turning chicken litter into gold, at least as far as plants are concerned.

The company — currently in its first round of venture capital fundraising — plans to turn chicken house waste into a carbon-negative fertilizer and soil conditioner.

Hardin, the company’s CEO, said the product is “ultra” climate friendly and aims to repair damage done to soil by the heavy use of chemical fertilizers.

The company’s product composts chicken litter, or the used bedding material, manure, feathers and food from the floor of a chicken coop or house, and combines it with biochar, a form of charcoal used to increase soil fertility.

Carbon Chicken’s biochar is inoculated, meaning it has been “charged” with microorganisms to enhance its soil amendment properties. The company’s biochar mix has a proprietary recipe of more than 200 microbes.

Ims, the company’s chief business officer, said the microbe blend is the “secret sauce for supercharging” plant health and growth.

Ims is also the founder and CEO of Food Recycling Solutions of Rogers, a company that diverts commercial food waste from the northwest Arkansas landfill. In 2024, the company collected, recycled and diverted 2.5 million pounds of food waste.

Hardin said Ims’ experience with making compost from those raw food materials helped Carbon Chicken come together, because both are types of organic waste that make for good soil amendments.

According to Hardin and Ims, the Carbon Chicken fertilizer reduces water pollution, upcycles waste, enhances soil health and directly sequesters carbon to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

“Farmers are worried about carbon right now, more than anything else besides tariffs. No. 2 is how are they going to get carbon back in their soil,” Hardin said. “The future of farming in Arkansas is carbon, and we are pioneering a technique for carbon farming.”

Ims said the fertilizer also reduces pollution in the Illinois River and Beaver Lake watersheds.

“We produce, right in the two counties, Benton and Washington County, over three-and-a-half million tons of litter per year,” Ims said. “A lot of that, probably about 10%, is really surplus or unaccounted for. Where does that go? No one truly can say.”

If the litter gets applied to fields raw or improperly disposed of, it leaches into the watersheds. The raw litter is “so high in phosphorus,” Ims said, that the excess phosphorus creates algal blooms, leading to algae forming in the watersheds and taking up nutrients.

“That’s a social mission as well, coupled with what we’re doing on a business side, is helping our waterways,” Ims said.

Starting Up

Carbon Chicken officially launched in January 2024 with a $200,000 seed capital raise from the McCoy Family Ventures Fund, though Ims and Hardin had been working on the idea since at least 2023.

Now, Hardin said, Carbon Chicken is in a Series A funding round, aiming to raise $1 million from private investors by August or September.

With the $1 million, Hardin and Ims want to expand operations onto a 40-acre poultry farm in Decatur (Benton County). The company currently has an 11-acre “innovation farm” in Fayetteville, where the fertilizer is made and used on crops.

“The idea is to have our own long-term carbon farming demonstration,” Hardin said. “It’s producing crops and we’re trying to be a valuable farm for the community.”

Hardin was also one of the first hemp farmers in Arkansas, with hemp still being grown on the farm. He and Ims said it’s possible hemp fiber could eventually be used in chicken bedding. Hemp seeds were also approved for use in poultry feed less than a year ago.

Though the fertilizer is a commercial product for farmers, Carbon Chicken also had its national retail launch in May, aiming to sell 4-pound bags in stores like Tractor Supply Co., Ace Hardware and garden supply distributors.

The 4-pound bag costs $19.99 plus shipping on the company’s website. It would basically replace a product like Miracle-Gro for gardening, lawn care or indoor plants.

The company received a nearly $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in July 2024, but it was terminated earlier this year amid governmental cuts. The grant was supposed to help Carbon Chicken implement biochar into the chicken litter already in commercial chicken houses.

“Once you put the biochar in the bedding, it absorbs all these greenhouse gases that were being lost, and the farmers were having to breathe those gases,” Hardin said. “This is the best thing for their chicken houses.”

Ims and Hardin still plan to do this once they have additional funding. “There’s this massive surplus of poultry litter, and it’s a renewable annual surplus that we know is a problem,” Hardin said.

This year, Carbon Chicken is running some “medium-sized” trials with local farmers, Hardin said, specifically Reagan Family Farm and Cobblestone Farms, both of which are in Fayetteville, among a few others.

Ims said the company has a waiting list of farmers who want to buy the fertilizer in bulk, but that the company “can’t make enough to be able to fulfill all of the needs” just from its pilot plant.

And the company is giving “deference” to the retail product while it’s in the national launch, though it does sell 1-cubic-yard totes of the product for farmers.

Carbon Chicken has a partnership with the Hmong farmers of northwest Arkansas, an ethnic group from mountainous regions of Southeast Asia, members of which purchased chicken farms in Arkansas. One of the company’s minority owners is a Hmong farmer who helps supply the litter.

As for retrieving biochar, Ims said businesses with large organic waste streams like sawmills and paper companies “don’t want to deal with it.”

“We can take that waste, turn it into a biochar, and then use that in our product, our carbon chicken for agricultural purposes,” Ims said.

Fertilizer Process

CC80:20, the company’s fertilizer product, consists of 80% composted chicken litter and 20% of the inoculated biochar. The mix is important because too much biochar can negatively affect a soil’s biome.

Farmers do already use chicken litter to fertilize their crops, but Carbon Chicken is different because the litter is composted. Raw chicken litter contains a lot of weed seeds, Hardin said, specifically pigweed.

“Some farmers absolutely refuse to use raw chicken litter because it has weeds in it, and nobody wants pigweed,” Hardin said. “We are the only ones that we know of that are taking this long, extended process to compost chicken litter at scale.”

Carbon Chicken composts the litter at least four times at 140 degrees. That gets rid of any pathogens and weed seeds that may be in the litter.

After composting, the fertilizer is also pelletized. Pelletizing heats up the mix one more time as a final check, Ims said.

“The pellet is important to us too, because it’s another differentiating factor and a benefit,” Ims said. “The farmer is already used to dispensing a pellet form. It allows also, for those that are more interested, this precision application right in the row along the seedlings that are being put in. It’s also a slow release, so it breaks down slowly because it’s a packed pellet.”