Fertilizer made from water, air, and electricity - in a shipping container parked next to the crop.
"They took a process that usually needs a billion dollars and a coastline, and put it on a flatbed truck. The farm makes its own fertilizer now."
Stand in a cornfield in Boone County, Iowa, and you will see the future of fertilizer, except it does not look like much. A steel container hums quietly at the edge of the field. No smokestack, no rail spur, no ship steaming in from a faraway plant. Inside, water is split, nitrogen is pulled from the air, and the two are married into ammonia using nothing but renewable electricity. The farmer who owns the field also owns the factory.
That container is TalusAg's answer to a problem most people never think about. Ammonia - the backbone of nitrogen fertilizer - is one of the most carbon-intensive chemicals on the planet, traditionally made in enormous plants that burn fossil fuels and then trucked, shipped, and railed across the world before it ever touches a crop. Roughly half the food on Earth depends on it. TalusAg's wager is that this whole arrangement is bigger, dirtier, and more fragile than it needs to be.
So the company, the agriculture arm of Talus Renewables, shrank the plant. Its modular systems make green ammonia on-site from sun, water, and air - cutting fertilizer costs by more than half and the carbon to zero. It is a quietly radical idea: decentralize a commodity that has been centralized for a century.
"Talus' green ammonia is cost-competitive with grey ammonia in the Corn Belt." - Hiro Iwanaga, Co-Founder & CEO
The Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia turns 113 years old this year, and it has mostly run at industrial scale, fed by natural gas. TalusAg's trick is not new chemistry - it is new packaging. Take the same reaction, run it on renewable power, and make it small enough to ship. Two models do the work.
A small, fully containerized unit producing up to 1.4 tonnes of green ammonia per day. Built to run on intermittent power - it can ramp with the sun and wind. This is the model that powered the world's first commercial on-site green ammonia install at Kenya Nut Company.
The bigger sibling, producing up to 20 tonnes per day. The first talusTen anchors North America's first commercial modular green ammonia facility in Iowa, built with the cooperative Landus. Still containerized. Still arrives on a truck.
FIG. 2 - The entire shopping list. No fossil feedstock, no global supply chain.
For a farmer, the pitch is plain: make your own nitrogen, on your own land, at a price that does not swing with a war or a shipping bottleneck. No more watching fertilizer costs spike because a plant on another continent went offline. Food security, but local.
For an industrial or energy user, the same green ammonia becomes refrigeration, mining feedstock, water treatment chemistry, marine shipping fuel, or a way to store energy. Ammonia is one of the few practical ways to bottle hydrogen - and TalusAg makes it where you need it.
Hiro Iwanaga did not arrive from a fertilizer dynasty. He came from finance - stints at The Baupost Group, Silver Point Capital, and a partnership at PFM - with a Stanford degree in Management Science and Engineering tucked behind him. An unlikely resume for someone now making ammonia out of air.
He co-founded Talus Renewables in 2021 around a stubborn observation: the things that feed and fuel the world are made in a few giant places and shipped everywhere else, and that arrangement is both carbon-heavy and brittle. His answer was to build, in his words, the world's first modular, carbon-free green ammonia system - and then to actually deploy it, first in Kenya, then in Iowa, rather than leave it in a slide deck.
Iowa co-op; co-built North America's first modular green ammonia plant.
Home of the first commercial on-site green ammonia system.
2026 low-carbon ammonia attribute agreement for fertilizer decarbonization.
Agreement to supply modular green ammonia in Africa.
Return to that container at the edge of the Iowa field. A year ago, the fertilizer that fed this crop began its life in a distant plant, rode a barge or a rail car for hundreds of miles, and arrived priced by forces no farmer could see or touch. Today the same nutrient is made on the spot, from the air above the field and the water beneath it, powered by the sky.
The container still does not look like much. That is rather the point. TalusAg has not built a monument; it has built an appliance - one that takes the most centralized commodity in agriculture and hands it back, quietly, to the people who actually grow the food. The smokestack is gone. The supply chain is a parking space. And the farm, for the first time in a century, makes its own.