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Arukah Capital converts Cambodia’s crop residues into biochar fertiliser and carbon removals, returning half of gross carbon revenue to farmers while reducing waste, fertiliser import dependence, and creating investment-grade carbon credits.
Joanna Yeo
CEO and founder @ Arukah Capital
When a harvest season ends, waste from crop yields often remains. Across Southeast Asia, 170 million tonnes of rice husks, straw, coconut shells and other residues are generated annually. Most of this is frequently discarded or burned in the open. The resulting smoke releases carbon and toxic fine particulate into local communities, while repeated burning degrades the soil farmers need for their next crop.
At the same time, these smallholder farmers also face severe exposure to global supply chain shocks and volatile rising prices for imported fertilisers. Cambodia and several nations in the region depend heavily on overseas supplies, making our region’s food production highly vulnerable to global price swings and disruptions.
Biochar offers a compelling solution to address both pressures.
Made by heating agricultural waste in an oxygen-deprived environment, it stores carbon and can help improve degraded soils. The difficulty lies in scaling production affordably, verifying long-term climate impact and ensuring that the farmers supplying the raw material meaningfully benefit from the market it creates.
Arukah has built its model to solve this equation. Agricultural residues are collected from local farm supply networks and transported to Arukah’s factory unit, where pyrolysis converts them into biochar, renewable syngas and rice husk vinegar. The biochar is then blended into fertiliser and returned to farmland through established distribution networks.
An end-to-end digital record will follow the material throughout this journey. Invoices, weight tickets and photographs document feedstock deliveries. Inside the plant, operating conditions and biochar output are monitored. In the field, farmers can scan QR codes and log fertiliser batches via a chatbot interface, connecting the product used in the field with the specific carbon removal certificate that will be certified by trusted global registries.
This verifiable traceability creates the basis for Arukah’s high-integrity carbon credits and unlocks financing from global buyers. Arukah then directs 50 per cent of gross carbon revenue back to farming communities. Farmers gain a reliable secondary income stream from residues that previously held little value, while Arukah secures the reliable feedstock it needs to expand and meet institutional buyer demand.
The business model draws revenue from both carbon credits and the sale of physical products like biochar fertiliser via partnerships with strong local distribution players.
In 2025, Arukah commissioned Southeast Asia’s largest biochar production facility in Cambodia, with capacity to process up to 60 tonnes of biomass waste and produce 18 tonnes of biochar daily.
Arukah’s model is still young in its journey to scale poverty alleviation across the region, but the physical foundation is already in place. In 2025, Arukah commissioned Southeast Asia’s largest biochar production facility in Cambodia. The plant can process up to 60 tonnes of biomass waste and produce 18 tonnes of biochar each day.
Arukah has also signed an MOU with the GIZ-administered Better Rice Initiative in Cambodia and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), supplying biochar and rice husk vinegar to the BRIC programme. The initiative works with 1,300 commune agriculture officers (CAOs) to test and deploy these products across local smallholder farms.
Beyond carbon sequestration, the pyrolysis process supplies renewable energy alongside biochar, at a scale that could cover more than half of its first fertiliser partner’s energy demand. This helps lower production costs while reducing dependence on imported energy and agricultural inputs.
More importantly, economic value moves back through the same chain. With each unique supply chain across markets, Arukah’s model engages farmers upstream, including those who supply the agricultural residues, and downstream, working with farmers to apply the biochar-based fertiliser and share in the carbon revenue. Their active involvement is recorded digitally from delivery to payment, making them visible within a carbon market that can otherwise feel far removed from the field.
Arukah plans to open three to five additional plants by 2027, reaching annual carbon removals of approximately 50,000 tonnes of CO₂e across its pipeline in the Philippines and Thailand, with Indonesia among its next pipeline markets. As part of these scale-up plans and market development, Arukah is actively engaging partners to complete fertiliser trials, secure long-term buyers and strengthen its digital monitoring system using spatial AI.
Arukah’s benchmark for success is simple: ensuring that every unit of carbon removed directly reinforces local food systems, shields farmers from volatile input dependency and returns tangible wealth to local agricultural communities, while also contributing to improved supply chain climate transition.
Arukah is transforming SE Asia’s agrifood systems by diverting waste from high emission burning to biochar, biogas and carbon credits - enhancing economic livelihoods, addressing climate change, and boosting agrifood and energy resilience at scale. We distribute technologies that convert agricultural waste into biochar and biogas, which allows us to develop high-quality carbon credit projects that also produce affordable fertilizers and energy. We allocate 50% of gross carbon credit project revenue back to farmers for their verified contributions, enhancing their yields and incomes, leveraging AI, IoT sensors and computer vision-enabled digital tracking, formally integrated with top global registries, and licensed digital payments. This approach is vital because much of our region heavily relies on fertilizer and energy imports - some countries import 85-100% of their fertilizer and have been in an energy crisis. By producing biochar-based fertilizers and bio-energy locally, we can improve farming yields and energy access more resiliently using domestic resources.
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