Sometimes it takes a warehouse fire to realise you’re doing it all wrong.
That was the case for Barrett Ersek. Back in 2009, he was flying high as the head of a Pennsylvania lawn care company when suddenly his entire fertiliser inventory went up in flames.
Faced with an empty warehouse and wider pressure across the state to reduce the amount of excess nitrogen reaching waterways, Ersek sought an alternative. He came across the idea of compost tea, a liquid fertiliser made by steeping compost in water to extract nutrients and microorganisms, and thought he had nothing to lose by giving it a shot.
That experiment eventually became Holganix. First spread on Pennsylvania lawns, the business has grown into an agricultural technology company that has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. It has even caught the eye of philanthropist Howard Buffett, now chair of its advisory board, and Virgin founder Richard Branson, who called its flagship Bio 800 product “Mother Nature in a bottle”.
As it expands its work with farmers in regenerative agriculture, environmental credits and agricultural data, chief strategy officer Tim Weaver explained to AgNavigator where the company goes next.
‘It’s penicillin for soil’
AN: What is Holganix?
BE: Holganix is a soil health platform. We’re on a mission to help growers, to help climate, to help food and water security, and most of it lands in three buckets.
The first is Bio 800, which is a liquid biological probiotic for soil that brings life back to the soil. It’s penicillin for soil.
We also focus on environmental assets because these growers are doing good things on their farms that companies need, such as at-scale insets and offsets, whether it’s carbon or water.
We’ve also launched this third wing of Holganix, which is called Horizons. It’s a data intelligence platform.
AN: To start with Bio 800, if a farmer is transitioning to regenerative agriculture, why do they need this product?
BE: Regenerative practices like cover crops and reduced tillage are great but don’t necessarily bring that microbial life back to the soil. Over time, they can allow that life to recover, but Bio 800 is a hack where you can bring life there instantly. Then those practices help grow it and nurture it.
But that first big wave of life has this catalytic effect that starts that virtuous cycle. It’s regen accelerated.
AN: So it’s not necessarily a long-term product for a farmer? They’ll eventually get to a point where they have no need for it?
BE: We haven’t gotten there yet, but we’ll see. We have growers in the US in their eighth year of using Bio 800 and they’re seeing their organic matter grow and grow and grow.
If somewhere in this journey that flywheel is flowing on its own and they don’t need Bio 800, that would be amazing for us.
Can environmental markets de-risk the regen transition?
AN: What does it say about regenerative agriculture that growers farming this way often still need income from financial assets because they can’t make enough from simply growing food?
BE: To go to something like no-till, cover crops or reduced nitrogen is a meaningful risk for growers because the inertia of farming is to continue to do all those things and get the results that are expected.
Where the support from corporates really helps is by bringing in an additional income stream to mitigate some of that risk. That allows them to make that jump and is an incredible catalyst for getting them to look beyond that risk. Then, once they’re on the other side of it, they stick around.
AN: So if farming changes, if the world changes in such a way that climate breakdown is mitigated and soil quality improves, does Holganix still exist in, say, 100 years’ time? Are you a transition company, almost like a charity trying to put itself out of business?
BE: We do feel like we’ve been gifted this penicillin for soil and it is our mission to get it on at least 2 billion acres globally. If our role is to reintroduce soil health, to reintroduce life to the soil, and if that’s all we do, we’ll have had a very good run. We’ll smile as we sit back on our rocking chairs.
AN: But is that the aim? Do you see yourself as a transition company, or is there a strategy that would see a farmer needing something from Holganix long term?
BE: There are always challenges to soil health: extreme weather, extreme water issues, and farming does have an impact on soil every season, so we’re pretty confident there will always be a use for Holganix.
Turning soil into data
AN: Horizons is your data intelligence platform for farmers and growers. How does it differ from other products or platforms out there?
BE: The thing I am most proud of with Horizons is the gross tonnage of soil that is collected. What we’re able to generate in terms of intelligence from the soil is unmatched, and it is a lot of work.
It is a lot of work at scale to get right, and we have a lot of field crews and a lot of laboratory time that goes into it, but the results that our growers and those corporate partners have pulled out of it have been invaluable.
AN: How big an area have you tested?
BE: We’re all over the United States and in several areas in Canada. As we have scaled, row-crop acres are where we’ve grown most, and we’ve got data from the East Coast to the West Coast.
AN: And you financed and carried that out yourselves? That’s presumably expensive, laborious and a risk?
BE: It has been, for sure, but what we’ve learned in the last 15 years is that when you’ve got so much evidence of the product working and its efficacy, it makes it much easier to make investments in that whole platform.
No one’s done soil testing this way. No one’s made this kind of investment in data. And we’ve seen how that extends to the profitability of a corporate, a grower and Holganix itself. We’ve seen that opportunity and, buoyed by our knowledge and faith in Bio 800, that entrepreneurial spirit has helped us go big.
Where does Holganix go next?
AN: Would it be expensive for you to expand into another country because you would need to carry out all that testing there too?
BE: We have to be thoughtful about the go-to-market and make sure that everything is balanced. The investment of bandwidth is equally as important, and we have to be very thoughtful about how and where we grow.
AN: Finally, what’s next for Holganix?
BE: Continued growth in the US and continuing to explore new markets. Using the data is maybe the biggest new horizon as we’re starting to understand crop quality as well as we understand quantity.
