Rick Storre, owner of Freshwater Farms and Ecowpots said his name derived from a desire to sell them possibly one day on the Internet. Tyson Ritter/The Eureka Reporter
By VIVIAN TRACY, The Eureka Reporter
Published: Sep 4 2008, 11:41 PM · Updated: Sep 5 2008, 12:42 AM
It’s a clever product — started from a by-product, that once was a food product and will someday likely be a household product on the potting benches of every green thumb in America. They are known as Ecowpots; and they are the brainchild of Eureka resident and owner of Freshwater Farms, Rick Storre.
Storre said he came up with the idea about six years ago after noticing the “huge amount of dairy waste” in farm-rich Humboldt County. Himself a seasoned cultivator of native plants who often utilizes such waste for fertilizer, Storre said the idea came to him as a better way to package potted plants.
Rather than the usual recycled cardboard or plastic pots that are often used, Storre came up with a way to manufacture dairy waste into a biodegradeable and nutrient-infused pot that can be planted in the ground along with the bulb, flower or plant it holds.
“The whole thing is about raising your success level,” Storre said, and added that a part of his business is to “reveg” a building site that has had its plant life decimated during the construction process — the perfect job for one of his pots. “The hardest time for a young plant is the first three to six months,” he explained. With his Ecowpots, “I can provide not only a plant, but basically a pile of (manure) that can decompose and have micro-nutrients in it.”
Storre is all too familiar with the process of making something good out of a pile of manure that is delivered to him, not only as a longtime landscaper, gardener, farmer and nursery owner, but also as a man who once was given a 30 percent chance to live.
In March of 2004 Storre had a brain abscess rupture, which led to more than a month in intensive care, five brain surgeries in five months, and the doctor’s expectation for him to live the rest of his life in a vegetative state. It was after his fifth and final surgery, Storre remembers opening his eyes and casually saying “hi” to his sister who was keeping watch by his bedside.
After months of battling life-threatening brain swelling and multiple surgeries, “It was the ‘old Rick.’ Just like that.”
Storre said he “just instantly came out of it as quickly as I came into it,” although it “took a lot of physical therapy,” and with a new lease on life, the project he started before he went into the hospital, was the first one he wanted to resume when he got out — Ecowpots.
Since then he has partnered with machinist and dairyman Darrel Harnden, which has resulted in the Ecowpots being produced seven at a time from a press “the size of a U-haul trailer,” Storre said. The success of the pots has been tested and proven multiple times by Storre himself, as well as several of his nursery clients — who Storre said all called him to say that they loved it.
He also decided to test his product at an industry trade show in San Mateo, by submitting 30 of his Ecowpots on the “new products table.” The result? “We got best of show,” he said, along with national attention from media covering the event at the time.
Industry kudos for ingenuity and client success-tested, now all Storre says he needs are a few investors to help take his product to the top of the heap. Storre said he has already approached Headwaters Fund managers as well as a non-profit organization that deals with dairy waste called National Resource Conservation Service.
“It’s really phenomenal,” he said of how his idea has grown, and feels that the sky is the limit for the many ways in which Ecowpots can be customized. “We add all these really cool modern micro-organisms to the pots — things that native plants need to really start to take off,” he said. “Once you get the base thing figured out, there’s a lot of other things we can do. There are so many things we can do to adjust this for different pH-level plants and species.”
While he can’t patent his idea, since “you can’t trademark cow manure,” Storre said he plans to continue to “aggressively try to get the word out” and search for investors. And, for anyone who wants to see how a pile of waste can be transformed into a nutrient-rich planting pot, Storre said he’s always ready to show his invention off. “There’s always one at the front desk to show people.”
(Vivian Tracy can be reached at vtracy@eurekareporter.com or 707-269-7449.)
Related Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment