A 16-year-old helms this new regenerative farming startup

When she was a freshman in high school, Harper Moss took a design class that helped her think about problems “systematically.” Then, she participated in a social entrepreneurship program that taught her about founding her own startup.

Now, at 16, those lessons are paying off: Moss, not yet old enough to vote, is the CEO and co-founder of Carbonzero.eco, a regenerative farming startup that emerged from stealth earlier this month.

“You kind of think about what you’re passionate about, and I was passionate about the environment,” Moss told Tech Brew about conceptualizing her company.

Carbonzero.eco takes agricultural waste—specifically almond shells—from farmers and uses a process called pyrolysis to turn it into biochar. The carbon in the biochar is then sequestered for “up to 1,000 years,” rather than released into the atmosphere in a landfill had the almond shells been taken there to decompose.

Then, the nutrient-dense biochar is sold back to the same farmers who produced it and put into their soil.

“Biochar is basically bio waste,” Moss said. “[It’s] been proven to actually improve crop yields and improve soil quality. So putting biochar in soil has the benefits of improving soil as well.”

Moss said that she chose to create biochar using almond shells because they’re “largely available” and decided to set up Carbonzero.eco’s plant in Williams, California, on a farm that is used to aggregate almond shells from “hundreds” of California almond farms to eliminate transportation emissions.

Carbonzero.eco raised $3.5 million in its first seed round from managers and execs at Google, Amazon, and Meta, among others, and signed over $7 million in contracts with California almond farmers who plan to buy biochar from the company.

“[Farmers] haven’t been a big enough part of the carbon conversation before,” Moss said in a press release. “Regenerative farming and carbon sequestration go hand in hand thanks to biochar.”

And Carbonzero.eco is able to produce a lot of biochar: Moss’s company plans to create 30,000 tons of biochar yearly, which will “mitigate 1.5 million tons of CO2 emissions” that would have occurred through normal decomposition.

Moss said the Williams plant will begin operations in May.