The Grass Is Always Greener When The Trees Still Stand

The Night of the Marauding Bovines

Under a starlit sky in rural Maine, Wendy Owens awoke to an unexpected commotion. Leading a canoeing trip for 11-year-old boys, she had prepared for many contingencies, but not this. As she unzipped her tent, she was greeted not by one of her young charges, but by a sea of curious bovine faces.

“I got out and there were cows all around us,” Owens recalled with a chuckle. “There was one cow standing with two feet in a canoe and two feet out of a canoe. There was a little bull. It was pretty exciting…I had to herd them away and the kids slept through the whole thing.”

This nocturnal cattle invasion, which Owens fondly dubbed “The Night of the Marauding Bovines,” is just one of countless outdoor adventures that shaped her path to becoming a pioneer in sustainable agriculture. The following morning brought another surprise: “The next morning, the kids thought that what they saw was a bear far away. These were a little bit more city kids and it was a cow.”

This ability to navigate unexpected challenges and bridge the gap between urban perceptions and rural realities would serve Owens well in her future endeavors. Today, as the founder and CEO of Hexas Biomass, Owens is working to revolutionize the raw materials industry with a remarkable plant called XanoGrass^TM.

The Trail to Entrepreneurship

Owens’s journey to the cutting edge of climate tech began far from the boardroom. Growing up in Virginia, she found solace and excitement in nature from an early age. “I just felt very comfortable outside,” she reflected. “I loved to be outside. I loved nature. It was quiet. It was peaceful.”

This passion led her to a first career in mountaineering and outdoor leadership, guiding hiking and canoeing trips for youth. Her outdoor experience was extensive and varied: “I grew up outdoors. That was my playground. That’s all I wanted to do when I was a kid, was be outside. Then my first career was actually in mountaineering - Leading hiking andcanoeing trips.”

Owens’s outdoor education was formalized through programs like the National Outdoor Leadership School, where she spent a summer and a semester in the Rockies. She also led trips in Maine and upstate New York during her post-high school years. “If I could still do it, if that could still be my career, I think I would still be out in the mountains,” she admitted.

These experiences, while seemingly distant from her current work, laid the foundation for her approach to entrepreneurship. “I think about my role as a CEO and as an entrepreneur as being a trip leader,” Owens explained. “There is that untraveled trail, basically breaking trail - It’s new. And so the process of leading trips…but also being a leader that let people, these kids in particular, overcome the challenges of carrying a pack or portaging a canoe…just being there for them to facilitate their enjoyment of the outdoors - That’s where I find the connection between leading trips and then leading a company.”

Owens’s journey from outdoor educator to sustainable agriculture entrepreneur reflects a deep-rooted commitment to environmental stewardship. Her experiences in nature instilled a profound appreciation for the delicate balance of ecosystems, a perspective that now informs Hexas’s mission “to provide humanity with access to carbon-negative, soil-regenerating, and livelihood-sustaining nature-based raw materials.”

Just as Owens once guided young adventurers through challenging terrain, she now leads a company navigating the complex landscape of sustainable commodities and materials science. Her outdoor leadership philosophy of being a facilitator, ensuring the right equipment and tools for a successful journey, translates directly to her role as founder and CEO, where she’s equipping industries with the tools to transition away from unsustainable practices.

Reimagining Raw Materials

But before entering into this chapter with Hexas, Owens found herself on a much different track. “It was not a straight line to get here by any stretch of the word,” she admitted. Inspired by a childhood fascination with Greek mythology, she pursued classical studies in college and graduate school. To some, this foundation in humanities might seem ill-suited for a future in biomaterials, but Owens sees it differently.

“There’s so much to be learned from our past,” she argued. “I am a student of history. I’ve learned from history and history is what allows us to not make mistakes that others have made in the past, right? To avoid those mistakes or otherwise learn from them.”

Owens’s classical education, far from being a detour, has proven invaluable in her current role. She recalled, “I had started my first company out of graduate school and that was in technology and education, but it didn’t work. If I knew then what I know now, things would have been different…I believe that if a business gets to the point where I’m not adding value or sufficient value anymore, and perhaps I’ve just gotten bored…then it’s time to go. You know, it’s the right thing to do for the business and for the people who are invested in it, either as employees or investors.” 

Paired with her subsequent experiences starting companies and advanced materials engineering and biotechnology, a core insight around humanity’s relationship with the natural world emerged. “We’re not really making the highest and best use of our natural resources. We’re wasting things. There’s a lot of waste happening. We’re not getting the ROI that we really should, especially from agriculture, for what we put into it. There’s just things that are not being used,” Owens stated.

“So I was very much, of course, from the perspective of looking at nature and loving nature and wanting to preserve it long-term, and then realizing that we are not utilizing nature and what nature has given us to the highest and best use. And so that’s really what had me looking for another opportunity, an entrepreneurial opportunity, to utilize the skills that I gained from materials. And then, I later also was in biotech, and bringing those two together to think about: ‘How do we use materials sustainably and how do we produce materials sustainably?’,” she continued.

According to Hexas, humans cut down 15 billion trees each year and use 80 million acres of cropland to produce biofuel from food crops - This is the equation that Hexas aims to rewrite.

The Birth of XanoGrass™

The idea for Hexas and its flagship product, XanoGrass^TM, came to Owens through a serendipitous introduction to a biomaterials company seeking a CEO. In learning about the company, it sparked a realization: There was a need for a more sustainable, less wasteful plant-based raw material that could replace wood and fossil fuel-based products.

“I could do this and I could do it better than them,” Owens remembered thinking. So with characteristic determination, Owens began experimenting in her backyard, sourcing wild grass varieties and selectively breeding them to create what would become XanoGrass^TM. The process was filled with trial and error: “Is this stuff going to grow? How’s it going to grow? What does it look like as it’s growing? A lot of research on just agricultural production. I did get my family involved in helping me plant and set things up.”

The development of XanoGrass^TM was a blend of scientific-method applications, hands-on experience, and talking to people: “It was a process of selective breeding, and consequently, utilizing scientific method and just propagation techniques and figuring out lots of failures, some dead plants, things that didn’t work.”

But this process wasn’t just about creating a new plant variety - It was about reimagining the entire supply chain of raw materials. Once harvested and processed, XanoGrass^TM becomes XanoFiber^TM, which ultimately serves as the replacement for wood and fossil fuel-based raw materials. Hexas’s patent-pending Farm-to-Fiber^TM platform embodies this holistic approach, allowing Hexas to manage each step to assure the highest quality. 

This process begins with tissue cloning of proprietary XanoGrass^TM varieties to ensure uniformity, followed by planting on marginal land to improve soil and sequester carbon. Hexas then contracts with local farmers for XanoGrass^TM production at fair prices, harvests the XanoFiber^TM using proprietary technology, and then processes it into a format that serves as a drop-in solution for various industries, omitting the costly need to modify existing manufacturing systems and decreasing the reliance on wood and fossil fuel-based raw materials.

Unleashing XanoGrass^TM’s Potential

XanoGrass^TM, as Owens described it, looks like “corn and bamboo had a baby.” It grows rapidly, reaching heights of over 20 feet in a single season, even in Washington state’s climate, where Hexas is based. Unlike many fast-growing plants, XanoGrass^TM is non-invasive and gentle on the soil.

“It has these broad corn leaves and then a tall bamboo-looking stalk. So the leaves themselves wrap around the stalk,” Owens explained. “It’s rather gentle. It doesn’t even have seeds, so it’s not invasive. It doesn’t have thorns or anything like that. It’s just sort of a gentle plant. It’s very richly green.”

When harvested and processed into XanoFiber^TM, it can replace wood and fossil fuel-based raw materials in many applications, from construction materials to biofuel. “XanoFiber^TM is very woody. It has a really nice smell to it, more of a woody smell to it. It chips like wood, it grinds like wood, you can make a powder out of it, or you can have just long stalks,” Owens described.

But the XanoGrass^TM-XanoFiber^TM suite is more than just replacing existing materials. Owens sees it as a tool for environmental restoration. “We want to then repair the literally billion acres of land around the world that have been damaged by over-farming or by mining or by some other industrial applications and turn it into reusable land for rewilding or for food again,” she explained.

XanoGrass^TM is a powerhouse of sustainability. Hexas states that XanoGrass^TM is perennial, fast growing, yields 25 to 35 dry tons of biomass per acre year-over-year, is highly pest-resistant, grows in different climates and soil types, tolerates drought, and has low ecological demand.

These characteristics make the resulting XanoFiber^TM an ideal candidate for replacing traditional raw materials in a variety of applications across multiple industries, such as supplementing or replacing wood, food crops in energy production, and other fossil fuel-based feedstocks. Not to mention, while providing the same or better performance at a 20 to 25 percent reduction in cost and without the need to alter existing manufacturing systems.

In a breakthrough for sustainable energy, XanoGrass^TM has received U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approval as a bioenergy crop. Its processed form, XanoFiber^TM, produces three to five times more cellulosic ethanol per acre than corn, and nine to 18 times more than corn stover. Importantly, this higher yield comes with significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions across its entire lifecycle. As an industrial energy pellet, XanoFiber^TM outperforms traditional wood pellets, burning at 18.6 megajoules (MJ) per pound compared to 19.6 MJ per pound for wood pellets.

But the potential of XanoGrass^TM and XanoFiber^TM doesn’t stop there. Owens and her team at Hexas are exploring applications in renewable natural gas, biochemicals, bioplastics, pulp and paper, bioremediation, bio-composite reinforcement, animal bedding, packaging, and textiles.

Growing Pains and Gains

Yet, building Hexas into the robust company that it is today hasn’t been without its challenges. Owens cites funding as the biggest hurdle, particularly in a tough economic climate. “This is something that is both new but not new, unique, and something that a lot of people don’t have direct experience with: commodities and selling biomass and materials and such,” she notes. 

“I think we’re on the 250th iteration of the pitch deck after four years,” she shared. With each pitch deck, Owens has found the following to be crucial: “Focusing on things that may be more important or that I’ve discovered are more important to climate-tech people, versus materials people, versus just technology-based or hard-tech. So being able to really, in a very short period of time, tell the story, impart the vision, and demonstrate the value.”

Hexas has made significant progress. In one funding example, the company has secured nearly $2 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, including both Phase I and Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. “I would never say that getting a grant is easy…The timing has to be right. There’s a lot of things that go into it and you really need to socialize your technology over time,” Owens reflected. 

Notably, Owens is seeing a shift in industry attitudes. “People genuinely want to stop using fossil fuel-based raw materials,” she said. “Getting that biomass is critical. Early on, the U.S. government and other governments certainly saw that that is the key. Now, industry is really starting to see that having a consistent, reliable supply of biomass is the key to the bioeconomy.”

The company has also made strides in its customer base. Owens recounted an early international success: “We had planted over in Europe and were growing XanoFiber^TM for a large home goods and furniture company for them to use to make furniture.” Despite being complicated by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic at the time, this presented an excellent opportunity to get some research and testing done at an industrial scale, and ultimately demonstrated the real-world potential of XanoFiber^TM, particularly with helping industries improve their sustainability metrics without sacrificing performance or profitability.

The Future of Farming

Looking ahead, Owens envisions Hexas as a catalyst for revitalizing rural communities and transforming agriculture. By working directly with farmers to grow XanoGrass^TM on marginal or damaged land, Hexas aims to provide a consistent, long-term revenue stream while simultaneously improving soil health.

“We want to build a really symbiotic relationship with these farmers and want them to do well,” Owens explained. “So we’re looking at revitalizing rural communities, particularly those rural communities that maybe have desertification, have highly-salinated soil, [where] there has been mining done, [where] there’s some kind of contamination…XanoGrass^TM will grow there. It will also take up any contaminants from the soil and refurbish that soil again. And because it is a grass and much like your lawn - You let it grow and then you mow it, you let it grow and you mow it… - it’s a lower labor requirement for farmers as well. Lower input requirement, but with a really high rate of return.”

Owens emphasized the importance of a fully-integrated supply chain: “It’s critically important to have this as an integrated business model. We are very disjunct right now in our materials: Somebody cuts down the tree, somebody sells the tree, somebody chops up the tree, somebody then sells the chopped up parts of the tree, as an example. That just raises costs, it raises energy expenditures, and it doesn’t really bring value back to where we want to bring it, which is to the farmers who are doing the production.” 

By offering long-term contracts and technical support to farmers growing and harvesting its XanoGrass^TM and XanoFiber^TM, Hexas aims to create a more sustainable and equitable agricultural model. This approach to land use and crop production embodies Hexas’s motto: “Cut the grass and leave the trees.” 

So from The Night of the Marauding Bovines to pioneering a new future for sustainable agriculture, Owens’s journey embodies the spirit of thoughtful innovation and environmental stewardship. Since those early days, one piece of advice has always held true for Owens: “Trust yourself…Understand your industry, understand your customer, read the tea leaves, look at the data, look at history. But really trust yourself because you’re going to embody that knowledge and start executing on it.”

As Owens continues to execute on Hexas, it stands as a testament to the power of unconventional thinking and the potential for the raw materials industry to harmonize with nature. With XanoGrass^TM, Owens and her team are not just growing a new kind of grass. Rather, Hexas is cultivating a greener future for each step of the raw materials supply chain.