The office smelled like compost.
On a slushy day in February, I drove to the southeastern part of Minnesota, just outside the town of Cannon Falls. It’s the part of the state that passes by lovely, but unnoticed; a few grain silos, a barn, stretch after stretch of rolling field, sunny and soggy with half-melted snow.
The office slips by with the rest of the landscape, a small white building tucked between several large, grey storage barns, and the grey block warehouse attached to what appear to be more silos. Only the small white sign is slightly intriguing: “Suståne Naturally… Natural Fertilizers and Soil Builders.” But it does nothing to signify the complex personal and political journey that led to its existence. What could be so very interesting about fertilizer?
Office, building, and view at Suståne’s shipping and processing site in Cannon Falls, MN.
Since the idea’s inception in 1979, Suståne has been making high quality organic fertilizer almost entirely comprised of one crucial ingredient: turkey manure. This is not unfamiliar territory for Minnesota agriculture. The state produces 45 million turkeys per year, according to John Peterson of Ferndale Farms, a self-identified mid-size turkey producer in the southern part of the state who sells their manure to Suståne. “People often hear 160,000 and think we must be the biggest turkey farm in the world, but we’re actually a very small to mid-size farm. The number of birds we grow is by no means staggering in the world of turkey; we’re certainly not a big guy.”
This amount of turkeys, of course, produces a lot of waste. In the 2014-2015 calendar year, Ferndale sold just over 1,000 tons of turkey waste to Suståne, in fact a misleadingly under-representative figure, given that Ferndale turkeys are pastured in the summer and are outside on a part-time basis in the spring and autumn, weather permitting, and the manure is harvested only from the barn, not the pasture ground. It’s an imperfect metric, but roughly applied to that 45 million, this would indicate that the state of Minnesota alone is producing somewhere in the ballpark of 562,000 tons of turkey manure per year, or nearly 25 pounds per turkey. That’s a lot of poop.
The Minnesota State Pollution Control ask farmers to report how they are handling their manure, and different farms handle it in different ways. Some farms stockpile it, which Jon says requires significant oversight from the state, but allows farmers to time their manure application with the growing season. “In a bleak, unglamorous form it would just be making a big ugly pile of manure that you at some point intend to do something with,” John explains. “If you were a crop farmer, for example, you probably only have one or two opportunities to apply that to a field in a year, either in the fall right before harvest or in the spring after planting, are the only chances we have to get out and do anything with this manure,” John says, “but we’re still producing manure, the turkeys are producing manure, in January and July, so what are we going to do with that?”
Indeed, with increasing specialization in farm businesses, crops and poultry are rarely produced in tandem on the same farm. This leaves poultry producers with a preference for finding buyers for the manure, or even sometimes just giving it away when no buyer can be found.
This is what Craig Holden, founder of Suståne, was tasked to do when he returned to the family farm business in 1979. The youngest of four sons, his brothers were transitioning the family farms into larger scale animal production, and Craig, who had left the family business for a time, was welcomed home with the job of figuring out what to do with the increased waste.
“There was a big transition in American farming around the late 60s early 70s, and that’s when agriculture really started to get specialized,” Craig explained on a Friday afternoon, leaning back in a chair around the wooden table in his spacious, sun-filled office. Now the president of a successful company and with grown children working for the business, Craig Holden fills a room, comfortably weaving the family history, punctuated with sharp comments and a booming laugh.
“Prior to that, growing up, we were a very diversified farm. We had dairy cows, beef cows, pigs, sheep, chicken, turkeys, crops, and then when the next generation came along they specialized,” he says. “My brothers started specializing in turkey and hog production, and that business expanded but they didn’t buy more farmland, so there was an overabundance of manure generated.” Craig’s daughter, Michaella, sits across from him at the table as well; she works for Suståne doing mostly marketing, and I get the sense from her that her father is launching into an oft-heard family story. “By the time I came back to the business in 1979, they said why don’t you find an alternate use for, or alternate place to apply the manure. And interestingly at that time, as some farmers specialized in livestock and poultry production, the farmers that had been in that decided to get out of it and focus on crop production. So there’s really a big disconnect that occurred in our history of agriculture in America, and the big disconnect was manure.”
John Peterson tells a similar tale. He says of manure disposal on their farm in his parent’s generation, “I believe it was done much more informally with a group of local farmers. Farmer Brown would call and say that he had a field that he wanted to use the manure on, and then Farmer Johnson would call and he’d want some too.” When Craig took over the family manure problem, he recalls that none of the new crop farmers wanted to take it, having just got out of the business of dealing with animal manure. With nowhere to put the waste, he started composting it, and thus began the process upon which Suståne is built.
“Manure by itself can be a vector of disease,” Craig says, explaining the initial logic behind his solution to the farms’ manure problem. “And so one of the benefits of composting it is that it gets to a really high temperature and it destroys pathogens. And that’s the first thing it does. And the second thing it does is it makes the material homogenous rather than heterogeneous. The third is that it makes it much easier to apply, and the fourth thing is that it concentrates the mass of volume, so there’s less material to transport and apply. So that’s why we started composting.”
They built it out of sheer economic and environmental necessity. The next step, what to do with the waste once composted, they hoped would just fall into place. And for the first year, it did. “One farmer, who was 15 miles away, agreed to buy 100% of it,” Craig recalls. “I thought, ‘Man, this is a piece of cake!’” He recalls taking a trip with his wife that spring, and returning to find that the farmer had hauled away the manure in his own truck and left him a check in its stead. “And then it went downhill from there,” he laughs. “It got really hard after that. I was lulled into complacency at first thinking this is going to be really easy, and then it got really, really hard.”
The years that followed were a series of tantalizing near-successes. Their compost got traction in the corn business, until the corn market bubble burst in 1983 with market devaluation so bad the government began actually paying farmers to not plant corn that year. Then they moved to the canned goods crop business, working with Green Giant to improve yields for their farmers and almost scoring a business-making contract – until the company completely overhauled their growing model to adjust to changing demand.
It seemed, perhaps, like things were not working out for Craig. Indeed his family began to have doubts about the amount of time he had spent on this manure thing without managing to have made it profitable. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Craig recounts, “and then out of the blue in early 1987 I get a phone call from a guy I’d never heard of before, and he says ‘Hey, do you want to start an organic fertilizer company?’ And I said ‘Well, I don’t know, why?’ And he says, ‘Well, you’re the guy! Everybody says you’re the guy to talk to!’”
The man’s name was Ron Weber, a businessman turned investor who had made his money importing fishing lures to the United States. With his partnership and financial backing, Craig started Suståne and began to build the company and production process that exists today. Their troubles, of course, were far from over. The compost product as it existed was wet, heavy, and dense – deeply impractical for a non-local business model. Additionally, creating a business required a larger compost site than could be accommodated at the farm, as well as processing and shipping facilities.
The first hurdle was more easily cleared than the second. “Let’s take the water out of it,” Craig says Ron told him, “and granulate it so you can ship it and people can apply it with conventional fertilizer equipment.” This turned out to be a key factor in the business’s success, turning the compost to fertilizer that can be stored, shipped, and easily handled in all quantities. The second problem nearly finished them.
View of the holding pond and adjoining field from Suståne’s compost site.
The problem, ironically, was publicity. In 1987, Suståne won the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Waste Management. “We were the first time a farm family had ever won that award,” said Craig. This increased their publicity and recognition drastically, prompting them to look into an environmentally sound, permitted site specifically for composting the manure. “So we applied for a permit to design this one-of-a-kind, first-of-a-kind site, and as soon as we did we ran into a lot of local resistance. And we were fought, long story short. We were fought for over 10 years, which was a very long time.”
The citizens of the area were unhappy about the idea of a manure processing facility in their area, and attempted to bury the business in legal fees and specious environmental concerns. Ron pulled out in 1991, advised by his attorneys that a legal battle would result in the local resistance movement coming after him because the company itself had so few assets. What followed was a string of partners, most of whom pulled out, a long legal and publicity battle, and the struggle to keep the existing business viable while keeping the dream of the full composting site alive. “It was really miserable the first 25 years,” Craig recalls, laughing. “We lost money for a long time.”
Eventually, however, Suståne won their case – the environmental concerns the local groups had brought against them simply didn’t apply to the site Holden had chosen. The facility is built on “impermeable, compacted clay” that prevents surface pollutants from reaching the groundwater. Craig laughs, “I had a lot of people that just felt sorry for me,” including the chair of Carleton College’s Department of Geology, who went to court with Holden and “just argued the thing on science.” “He’s my hero,” Craig says, with every bit of seriousness.
Arriving at the Suståne office today, located on their processing and shipping property, none of the feeling of past tensions is present. It is a cheerful, relaxed but efficient operation in a decidedly serene setting. Michaella is my guide for the day, walking me through each step of the process that turns turkey manure into market-ready fertilizer. Young and friendly, Michaella is brimming with relaxed, but poised professionalism. Her black winter coat is chic and stylish, but her boots are meant for farm work.
We drive first to the compost site, about 20 minutes out from the processing facility. If that was remote, this is isn’t even on the map, a distant herd of cows on a hill the only sign of people nearby. The site itself isn’t much to look at; driving by one might mistake it for a dormant construction site. Indeed, the main feature is rows of dirt, piled as high as a tractor and as long as football field, perhaps 15-20 in all. My nose, however, reminds me it is not dirt; it rained earlier in the day and the air is full of a ripe, earthy smell. The piles are surrounded by a large drainage pond, meant to collect excess water and prevent the piles from getting to high. Michaella explains that the lighter brown rows are the newest – crumbly, chalky brown they are a mix of turkey manure and the pine wood shavings that turkey farmers bed their barns with, scraped with an industrial machine from the floors of the barns, and piled in to Suståne’s trucks that take it here. The darker rows are almost black, thick and moist they no longer crumble off at the edges, but slice like slabs of clay.
Mid-age compost piles at Suståne’s compost site.
What’s going on inside the rows of compost is far more interesting than their appearance, but intricately related. Michaella qualifies her explanation: “I should give you the caveat that I am not a scientist,” she laughs apologetically, but it’s plenty detailed as is. The compost process, she explains, is what makes the difference between just putting turkey manure on the fields and using Suståne. “It’s no longer taking manure and putting it on cropland, it’s actually doing the 6 month aerobic composting process,” Michaella explains. “In composting, microorganisms are breaking down all of the dead organic matter.” They are turning the manure and wood shavings in that rich, dark material known as humus, often mistaken for soil, but in fact a late stage of compost that is rich in microorganisms. “If you take a teaspoon of soil,” says Michaella, “good, rich soil, over a million fungi are in that teaspoon of soil and over a billion bacteria.”
The compost process, then, is about more than just breaking down the manure; it is about creating an environment where the beneficial microorganisms can thrive, and indeed beneficial many of these organisms are. For that, the essential ingredients are oxygen and time, the former of which is achieved by a weekly compost turning. This turning also helps to expose all parts of the row to the internal temperature of the compost, a balmy average of 150 degrees year-round, with all the heat being generated simply from intense microbial activity. “The heat helps to break everything down,” Michaella says, pointing to the billowing steam that is rising from several rows, “so the healthy microbes are really thriving and anything that’s not so good is what gets killed in the process.” These bad things include any pathogens that may be present in the compost, but the heat also burns off things like antibiotics that might have been given to the birds that produced the manure.
The composting process is the key to making their product an asset to potential buyers; “You have to do this intensive composting to get material that’s going to be really, really valuable. If it’s not composted, if you’re just using manure and throwing it on your field, it can actually be toxic to your plants,” say Michealla. The processing that happens post-composting is the key to making it marketable.
From the compost site, a row that is ready to go will be loaded into a truck and taken to the processing and shipping facility. The processing plant is essentially a large, open, grey warehouse. Blaze, the man who oversees the processing, hands me a hard hat, safety glasses, an industrial-grade facemask, a plastic lab coat, and plastic shoe covers large enough for Suståne to accommodate a tour of NBA champions. “It’s dusty,” he says.
Inside the warehouse building it is loud and, indeed, dusty. Blaze first walks us past the huge holding bays, piled high with freshly dumped humus from the compost site. In the adjacent bays there are smaller piles, first of finely ground turkey feather meal, and then of potash. Though all of Suståne’s products are mostly compost, the feather meal and potash are added in relatively small quantities to adjust for nitrogen and potassium levels, respectively, allowing for different formulations of Suståne that better provide nutrients to different kinds of plants and soils.
The compost is first fed up a conveyor belt and through an industrial dryer. Because they have to keep heat levels relatively low for microbial health, it takes about an hour to bring one batch of soil from the 40% moisture level it comes in with down to the desired 10%. The feather meal and potash are then added, and the mixture is fed through what appears to be a giant cement turner, the length of the warehouse. Out one end, hundreds of small rocks and gravel are spitting out into a pile several feel high, sorting for size and foreign material. The finished product is then shuttled through to the next room, where it is fed into bags, ranging from 5 to 2000 lbs., depending on the end location of the product. Some shuttled to the outdoor suspended silos next to the warehouse, placed so an open-topped semi truck could pull up beneath them and fill its entire hold from above.
The processing tour takes about ten minutes, and my notebook and pen are completely covered in fine brown dust. I’m grateful for the mask, though I suppose it’s all organic. In the storage and shipping barns, Blaze shows us the variety of products churned out in the operation, small bags for the recreational garden farmer, to industrial-scale totes used in everything from organic agriculture, turf grass production, golf fields, landscaping, and even a variety of erosion prevention projects. “It’s both a fertilizer and a soil-builder,” explains Michaella, speaking to the positive microbial impact on soil health, and the way this can encourage plants to take root and thrive in environments where the soil has been depleted.
It certainly looks as if the business has come a long ways from its difficult beginnings. Citing the steading increasing interest in organic plant and food production, Craig is optimistic that their company growth will continue in line with the market, and Suståne already occupies a stable place as a forerunner in the business. Sold in countries across the globe, Suståne recently became the first foreign-made, organic fertilizer allowed for sale in China and remains the only North American organic fertilizer company that has a permit from the European Union. The company currently partners with around twenty turkey farms, and has the demand to justify it. Craig laughs, looking back at the ways the company has come from its uncertain beginnings. “We currently export to about 60 countries, which is really weird, and it’s all because the neighbor across the road wouldn’t take our manure for free in 1979.”
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