We’re thrilled to announce that Kairos has been awarded funding from Defra’s Farming Innovation Programme, delivered in partnership with Innovate UK. This grant will support our efforts to decarbonise agriculture and recover essential nutrients from agricultural feedstocks, advancing our mission to promote circular nutrient use in fertilizers.

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At Kairos, we’re committed to “closing the loop” on nutrient flows from organic waste. Nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are vital for growing crops and ensuring global food security. As the world population continues to grow, we’re already using half of the planet's habitable land for agriculture, often at the expense of forests and other natural carbon sinks. The IPCC estimates that land use change (like converting forests to agricultural land) is responsible for 13% of global CO2 emissions, underscoring the need to optimize land and resource use.

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However, securing a reliable supply of these nutrients is becoming increasingly challenging. Global phosphorus reserves are being rapidly depleted—U.S. reserves have dropped to less than 1% of historical levels. Meanwhile, nitrogen fertilizers are predominantly produced through the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process, which is responsible for a staggering 1.4% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

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The problem doesn’t stop there. When animals and humans consume crops grown with these fertilizers, much of the nutrient content ends up in landfills or spread on land. Land-spreading of manure is the second-largest source of agriculture emissions (after enteric fermentation). This also leads to over-accumulation of nutrients in soils as well runoff into waterways, which results in those nutrients being lost such that they cannot be recovered. These excess nutrients often cause eutrophication and harmful algal blooms, which disrupt marine ecosystems and create oceanic dead zones. In some places, farms are actually facing closures as the only way to combat excess manure production.

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At Kairos, we’re rethinking this wasteful linear system. Rather than letting valuable resources be used once and discarded, we’re pioneering a closed-loop approach. By recovering nutrients from human and animal waste, we aim to turn them back into targeted, non-leaching fertilizers that not only sustain global food production but also help restore environmental health.

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To achieve this, Kairos will collaborate with Cranfield University, the Royal Agricultural University, and the UK Agri-Tech Centre to advance our nutrient recovery technology. Together, we’ll demonstrate the effectiveness of fertilizers derived from waste, showing that innovation in nutrient management can support both food security and ecological balance.

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This project is funded by the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs’ Farming Innovation Programme Nutrient Management Competition. It is delivered in partnership with Innovate UK.