On this week's Local Motion, KVNF's public affairs show, we talk with Bart Eller, the executive director of Paonia Soil Company.
The conversation covers the company's history, the role Paonia Soil plays in supporting small farms and gardens, and the importance of soil health.
The interview was recorded during the Western Colorado Soil Health, Food & Farm Forum, which took place in Montrose in late January.
Local motion airs weekly on Tuesday nights at 6 and Saturday mornings at 10:30.
Interview transcript
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Lisa Young, KVNF: How long has Paonia Soil been in business?
Bart Eller, Paonia Soil: About 12 years.
Young: How did you guys get started?
Eller: It probably started with my mom when I was a little kid. I grew up in Colorado Springs, and she was an amazing grower. We had a greenhouse with exotics, Bougainvillea, and all these crazy tropical plants that shouldn't grow in Colorado. She could make them grow, and she did a big geranium sale for our church every year. That was the biggest fundraiser. I have memories when I was a kid of driving with my dad in the dump truck to Cañon City to fill it full of geraniums and bring 'em back to Colorado Springs to sell to folks.
Young: How did you end up in Paonia?
Eller: I was living in Moab, and this was in the nineties, and I'd been there about four years and met my wife there, and Moab was getting a little too popular. We were looking for somewhere a little out of the way. And I went down and saw my friends in Ridgeway, and my buddy Jack has a t-shirt shop there called Fishbone. And our other buddy, Billy Nershi was working for him. And y'all might know Billy Nershi. He's in a band called String Cheese Incident, and at the time, they were kind of a small little bar band, and they said, 'Hey, you got to go check out Paonia. It's really awesome, and they've got a great radio station (Editor's Note: Yes, he's referring to KVNF!), and we think you'll really like it there.'
Young: And so you ended up in Paonia. How did you get into dirt? And maybe that's the wrong term, is dirt. I mean, should I say soil?
Eller: It's supposed to be soil, but I'm consummately irreverent. Living organic soil is the technical way to talk about it.
Young: What is the process that you go through to create the soil that you're looking to create? And if I understand, you have a variety of soils, I mean, I've heard that you're the guru, you're the dirt whisperer type person.
Eller: So we start out by making a fancy compost. We use chicken litter, and a lot of folks just take whatever stuff they've got and make their compost that way. We're a little more scientific about what our feedstocks are, and we're trying to balance the minerals in it a little better. But no matter how much good balancing we do, all composts are going to be a little bit out of ratio from what plants really want. Mainly they're going to be a little heavy in potassium. It's the biggest problem I see on organic farms in the state when I'm consulting for them. Almost all of these organic farms are potassium-toxic.
A lot of what I do is educate people that nature gets it right and nature takes care of them. And so then they say, well, you said nature gets it right. Now you're telling me that nature got it wrong with compost. And it's true, but there's a reason, and I've come up with a hypothesis that, let's say, an animal dies in the forest. It's made its manure in one part of its lifecycle, and then when it dies, its body is decomposed, and it feeds the plants in the forest. And those two things happen at different times. So if you make a meat compost and your manure compost and you put those back together, now you've got a perfectly balanced complete compost. It's that we're kind of missing the meat component from the animal that made the manure. There are other amendments that you can use that are natural amendments that'll deliver that nitrogen component. One of them is soybeans. Another one that I really like is feather meal, and that is ground-up chicken feathers.
Young: You mentioned the meat component. That's not something that you're putting into your soil composting, or can you do that? Is that an allowable type of thing?
Eller: It is allowable, and it's interesting actually, after talking with Erica who's here of Delta Compost, she's now taking Homestead Meats byproduct and making a very specific type of compost. I really think you're going to see a lot more of that in the future. But in our world, we're able to accomplish the same thing with that feather meal. The feather meal's essentially a 14-0-0, which means it's 14% nitrogen, and half of that nitrogen is keratin-like hair and fingernails. That's a really complex folded protein that takes a long time to break down, and it needs biology to break it down.
It's really nice because it's essentially a battery. That's something I've seen a lot. We've mentioned the organic farm side, but on the conventional farm side, those folks are pretty much almost always using nitrate salts for their nitrogen source. The nitrates end up being fairly toxic to the soil biology. In addition, the bacteria that does like nitrates and will bioprocess the nitrates. Those bacteria need a lot of carbon to do that. So you end up in a way when you're using a lot of nitrate salts kind of burning the carbon organic matter out of your soil. And that carbon organic matter is the water-holding capacity of the soil. So if I go to an organic farm, you'll see them at 6% organic matter, really good, but potassium toxic. I go to a conventional farm and it's often like 1% or 2% organic matter.
It was Dr. Kristen Nichols at one of these conferences in Delta that really taught me how there's this excess fertilizer left to get the uptake when you're using soluble salts, and all fall and spring before your crop really is going, those salts are burning the organic matter out of your soil. And so if I can take a farm that has 1% organic matter and double that, that's a 300% increase in the water-holding capacity of the soil. So, in the arid southwest here, I can't say enough, and especially now with a lot of Denver municipalities banning lawns and things like that, really the lawn isn't the problem. It's the synthetic chemicals that they're using to feed the lawns that cause the runoff that causes the destruction of the organic matter. And that's why all these fields are hard clay.
Young: What have you learned through the years, or what has been your participation here at the (Western Colorado Soil Health, Food & Farm) Forum?
Eller: Oh, I've learned so much at this. We've been participating in this forum for three years. I was a speaker at the first year. Almost every breakout session or main session that I go to here, I learned something valuable.
Young: I'm kind of curious a little bit about the business side of what you do. Paint a picture for me...paint a picture for listeners. If they were to (Paonia Soil), what would they see?
Eller: Sure thing. Yeah, as far as the consulting goes, we're happy to do that for folks. We consult for everyone from the smallest organic farmers to the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. The compost itself is made outside. We do sort of a no-till compost, but we have a compost turner. That's how most of the compost in Colorado is aerated, with a big machine that turns it three times a day. To us, that's a lot like tillage. So we use the compost turner, and we found one used quite reasonable.
That's how we mix our feedstocks. In a lot of ways, it looks like a farmer's ranch. It's all agricultural equipment, but we do have a lot of machines that do the heavy lifting these days. So you'll see us making our compost. And I think our biggest year, we did about 2 million pounds of compost and we like to spend a lot of time curing it.
Young: Folks that somebody just has a small garden or something, and their soil sucks, and they want some help. Can they purchase your compost and bags, or how does it get delivered to the folks who want to get it?
Eller: We have a lot of different outlets, and we specifically don't work with big box stores. We've had people from Home Depot, for instance, talk to us, and we're just not interested in Home Depot or Walmart, those kinds of places. We have partnered with some distributors that are a little bigger. So in most towns in Colorado, there's at least one store that carries us. We try to have somebody who's a good partner who understands organic gardening and who gets our products, and then we work through them. And then, for folks who are more of a wholesale customer, landscapers, and folks like that, we have CPS distributors. They've got 17 locations around Colorado. We also have another distributor out of the Carbondale (and) Glenwood area.
A lot more of that distribution is really helping us out because shipping has become so expensive out here in rural Colorado. When we started, it cost us $40 to ship a pallet on the local freight company, and now they're charging us $140. So the distributor, even with their little bit of markup in there, can get it to the consumer much cheaper.
Young: Here at the conference, you're a vendor...I saw you out there sharing some knowledge with people. What has been one of the biggest questions you've heard folks ask you...concerning soil?
Eller: I would say the biggest questions revolve around fixing problems. And one of the amazing things about my work is that for me to sell something, somebody has to have a dream. Every single bit of our product that is sold is sold because somebody had a dream. What an amazing thing to get to allow people's dreams to come true. But farming and gardening is complex. A lot of the things that are shared are either rumor or myth or this, that or the other. And so we really work to try to use science and scientific principles. And at this point, we've helped so many people that when people come to me with their problems, I can usually tell right away what's going to help correct that. For instance, in a lot of weed control, the weeds are kind of telling the story of the soil.
I was just talking to a gentleman about (that), and I can almost guarantee that he's deficient in trace minerals. Trace minerals are so fascinating because on their own, if you ate them in a large quantity, they would be highly toxic. But a little bit of boron or manganese or zinc in your soil is so important to the plant's immune function.
And the same way a good vitamin helps heal you. These exact same minerals that would be in a vitamin are really healthy for plants in the soil, and they grow a fully mineralized plant. That in itself is then much healthier to eat as a human. And there's tons of evidence in this world that shows how much more mineralization is in organic vegetables. So it's a tricky thing when you're at the grocery store and you see, man, I'd have to pay 30% more for that organic broccoli. The nice thing is you're getting 60% more minerals.
Young: We talked about your getting into the business. I wanted to hone in a little bit on what was your dream and vision in the very beginning?
Eller: Well, it, as I kind of mentioned, came from my mom, and then I'm what you might call a serial entrepreneur. I've started several businesses over the years. One of our businesses was one of the first broadband networks in Colorado. We sold that one off, and I tried to launch a global ISP co-op franchise, and that one was going to take hundreds of millions. I knew I wanted to do something in regenerative agriculture. For a long time, we had seen soil companies. I figured the market was saturated. And then, in the seceding years, I saw Fox Farm start-up and Roots Organic and probably 30 other brands of potting soil. So, at some point, I decided I just needed to quit being chicken about it and needed to throw my hat in the ring.
It's a very difficult business with low margins, and there's always somebody else trying to eat your lunch. But what I can say is our customers tend to really be the best of the best, and now we're supporting hundreds and hundreds of these small farms, whether it's flower farms, veggie farms. And that allows people to be self-sufficient and resilient, and I just love that so much. I love this business, and I can't imagine doing anything else. And I'm planning on being in this one. We've already had offers to try to buy us out, and I'm not interested. We're committed to our customers. We know they depend on us. And one of the biggest things in this business is the lack of consistency.
I really had no idea. I knew I hated it when I got a potting soil a year after I'd used it, and it was different and it didn't work the same. But once I started testing all the stuff on the market, very few of the mixes on the market are the same year over year. And so we've really made it a key principle of our business to try to make the same product every time. And so some of our processes are less efficient than our bigger competitors, but they're in place in the way they are to make sure each batch comes out as close to the last one as possible every time.
Not everybody sees that we are a niche product for the, I would say, 20% or less of the consumer market that really gets that. They want a quality product. They want it the same every time. And in the end, we're able to show larger customers that there is a significant cost saving there. And so a lot of municipalities are now using us because even though we're more expensive than the media they were using before when they analyze the cost of the fertilizers, they were adding the truck to deliver those fertilizers, the personnel to drive the truck and fertilize the fertilizers, all of a sudden they're getting a 30% increase in overall cost savings.
Young: What are the municipalities using the composting for?
Eller: So, for instance, the city of Lakewood did a project in their arcane park, one of their big parks there and just outside of Denver. They had flowers, and their flowers were pretty nice, but they just weren't performing the way they wanted them to. So we talked 'em into taking a semi load, and they dug out half the beds with backhoes and left half, and the other half they planted out in our cut flower mix. Within two weeks of that planting, a pretty major hailstorm came in and just decimated everything. And as much of a believer as I am in regenerative ag, I wouldn't have thought that being pummeled by giant ice rocks would be something that regenerative practices could significantly help with. But the results were stunning. Within a week after that hailstorm, all the...old beds had not recovered. They had maybe like 10% survival rate in those beds, and all the beds that were planted into our mix within a week, you couldn't even tell that they'd been hammered by the hail, and they came back and thrived and delivered the look that the city was looking to do. And so right there, just the cost of those plants that they didn't have to replant paid for most of that truck of our product.