Warrior Earth: A Win-Win

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Warrior Earth: A WIN-WIN

Paul Stoner got the idea for Warrior Earth, a family-run forest investment company, when he spilled a bag of water softener salt on the basement floor of his family’s home.

“I looked at those little square pellets of salt and realized that large forests could be divided into smaller segments and traded on-line,” said Stoner, a serial entrepreneur and inventor who founded and sold a fiber optics company near Chicago along with its associated technological patents in 2008. He and his wife Renee launched Warrior Earth in 2009. Today, all their six children are actively involved in the Warrior Earth company, which is based in Columbus, Ohio.

The fateful salt spill occurred at about the same time former Vice President Al Gore was raising the profile of climate change and the role of carbon in that phenomenon. The now-defunct Chicago Carbon Exchange was active. A carbon credit bill also was moving through Congress that would have formalized carbon trading as part of American business.

As Stoner looked to the future, he set his sights on South America. The rainforest is a beautifully diverse environment that is rich with carbonsequestering trees and magic moments. One day, Stoner waterskied down the Amazon River in Peru while a pink freshwater dolphin swam alongside.

But Stoner was there to work. Initially, he conducted due diligence on 70 large-scale properties far off the beaten path in Brazil’s Amazon basin. After the exhaustive search failed to yield the appropriate property, Stoner was defeated.

Then, he met an ex-pat from Dayton, Ohio, who recently had married a Peruvian woman. After hearing what Stoner was attempting to do, he invited Stoner to visit Peru. Stoner arrived in the Amazon River town of Iquitos, Peru, where he hired a full cadre of lawyers, pilots, translators, realtors, accountants and other consultants just as he had done in Brazil. Together, they began the arduous task of exploring every facet of 60 additional properties.

Depending on where they were, the team spoke in Spanish, Portuguese and tribal dialects and sometimes found themselves paddling down tributaries in dugout canoes to visit indigenous chieftains. During this time, Stoner contracted cholera. His fever hovered around 104° F. He was ill for more than a month and yet he continued to push, meet with landowners and do missionary work in his off hours. No suitable property was found, so it appeared as if all the hardship would be for naught.

Then, the devout Christian asked his friend from Ohio to pray with him. Prostrate on the floor, Stoner asked God to forgive him for wasting his family’s financial resources and said he was going buy a plane ticket home to Ohio that same day unless God stopped him.

As the story goes, Stoner was walking down the street to purchase the ticket home, when a man on a motorcycle blocked his path and asked, “Are you Senor Pablo Stoner?” The stranger named Moises represented eight elderly siblings who were ready to sell 83,000 acres of timber, a holding the size of the country of Grenada.

“God told me to find you,” Moises said.

A month later, Stoner had closed on the property known as “Jay Alay,” pronounced “High-ah-leigh.” In its early years, Warrior Earth, which took its name from Exodus 15:3, offered “forest tiles.” It was a conservation-minded model that allowed people to purchase tracts of rainforest timber to preserve them.

“It was like buying a gift certificate for a star or land on the moon because people could ‘own’ something, but they couldn’t sell it for a profit,” Stoner said. “Our purchasers owned both the trees and the land, making it a traditional real estate transaction that was complicated by international regulations. The cumbersome process could take months to complete.”

Always a problem-solver, Stoner turned the model over in his mind—and had an ah-ha moment on the scale of the Great Salt Spill.

“The problem was dirt!” Stoner said, laughing.

While Warrior Earth still offers a limited number of traditional properties, ranging from 300 acres to 10,000 acres with river frontage and timber, the firm has created an entirely new product. The product is called “Forest Classifieds” and includes an online marketplace, www.warriorearth.com , where they can be sold.

“We separated the trees from the dirt,” Stoner said. “Problem solved.”

Under the new model, Warrior Earth SAC legally owns the land, while the forest buyers and sellers legally own the standing vegetation. (Warrior Earth supplies the forest owner with a physical certificate of forest ownership incorporating digital security features.) This separation moves the transaction outside the realm of traditional real estate, so closings now take place in a day or two and are not subject to the labyrinth of international regulations governing buying and selling real property. It creates an easily marketable product without any of the liabilities of actual land ownership. The online marketplace is continuously updated, so new forest holdings are constantly available.

“Because the forest is listed ‘for sale by owner,’ the product is not classified as securities by the SEC,” said Stoner, citing SEC v Howey, 1946.

On the website, various sized forest tracts are bought and sold “peer-to-peer.” Investors click the “Buy It” button to purchase a conservation forest listing from the online marketplace. When forest owners are ready to cash out, they post their listing on “Forest Classifieds.”

Of the original 83,000 acres, 60,000 acres have been set aside and allotted for selling conservation timber. The timber is bought and sold by the cubic yard, extending 90-feet above ground level.

According to Stoner, the company has an inventory of 8.71 billion cubic yards of timber aka Assets Under Management (AUM). As of November 27, 2023, based on that day’s price of $0.1150771 per cubic yard, the value of the standing timber was around $1.002 billion and the price continues to escalate, he said.

“Our company has no bank debt and very low operating costs,” Stoner said.

Working under the company motto, “Save Trees, Make Money,” the entrepreneurial family is procuring a host of patents as it pioneers this new investment vehicle. Stoner said Warrior Earth is poised to acquire additional properties in Brazil and Africa, where they will put this model to work on behalf of conservation and investors.

The opportunity has resonated with investors. Warrior Earth is fielding a lot of calls from potential clients who are retiring and are seeking high passive incomes from their 401K savings.

“The IRS allows owners to buy and sell forest tax-free from their personal IRA or Solo-401K retirement plans,” Stoner said.

The Stoners’ daughter, Allison, handles the 401K rollovers into forest ownership, helping ensure the transactions don’t accrue any penalties. Under a typical use case, the product could generate about $445,000 of annual income on a $3 million forest purchase and resale, he said.

The Warrior Earth family also takes the guesswork out of the equation. The exact profit forest owners will receive by selling their holding is updated every second on their phone or their computer.

Finally, many of the forest listings offer a 100 percent money back guarantee, so risk is non-existent.

“If a buyer can’t resell their forest in a timely manner, the seller will refund their original payment,” Stoner said. “In addition to sellerprovided money back guarantees, Warrior Earth also has a patent-pending system of forest investor ‘Angels.’”

According to Stoner, these investors, register to have the first right to “swoop in and fund money back guarantees for other transactions.” This unique process creates additional profit for the Angels and protects other clients’ principal.

Stoner said that a few sellers even allow buyers to deposit funds into a third-party escrow account, which means buyers don’t have to release funds until after their forest resells at a profit. These “super safe” transactions come with slightly higher fees, but they are designed for first-time buyers who want to test the Warrior Earth system, he said.

“At Warrior Earth, our vision is the ultimate win-win for the rainforests and for investors,” Stoners said. “We’ve harnessed the power of the economy and put it to work for the environment, which benefits us all.”

Warrior Earth is also the source for rainforest ranches. With more than 30 miles of river frontage, the team offers tracts ranging from 300 acres to 10,000 acres. On these tracts, the landowners own both the vegetation and the soil beneath. They can manage accordingly including harvesting timber, selling carbon credits and building homes or ranches.

In addition, Warrior Earth maintains a network of local contacts and contractors who can make any dream come true whether it’s installing off-the-grid power sources or building luxury homes, boat docks and helipads to make coming and going easy.

Find Out More

For more information about Warrior Earth, explore the organization’s website. WarriorEarth.com