Located on Highway 549 just west of Okotoks, Earth Smart Solutions is one of the area’s most innovative agricultural businesses.
“I started a company called Green Oasis in 1994,” said Earth Smart president Kelly Otto. “We provided commercial and industrial weed control and lawn care for municipalities, hospitals and other institutional customers, and had become a big player in that industry.”
It was a time when cities were beginning to ban the use of chemical herbicides. To secure his company’s future, Otto began looking for ways to keep lawns green and free of weeds without adversely affecting the environment.
In 2012, one of his clients told him about a product called CB 707, developed by retired biochemist Bill Sanger. It improved the effectiveness of his herbicide, enabling him to reduce the application rate by 50 per cent. Otto created Earth Smart Solutions to distribute CB 707 and other Sanger biological products designed to help plants cope with stress and disease.
Otto’s biggest challenge was economics. “We were shipping stuff all over the world,” he said, “but I had to figure out how to turn it into a profitable business.”
Rather than enter into distribution agreements with large retailers, Otto elected to build his own 28-person sales force. Earth Smart representatives are now located across Western Canada and into the United States. Many are farmers themselves, selling to their neighbours.
“We sell directly to farmers,” he said. “Our products are not typically something a farmer will go into a UFA to buy, so you need somebody to teach them how to use them.”
In addition to its line of proprietary agricultural products like soil conditioners, plant nutrients and herbicides, Earth Smart is also the Canadian distributor for Humic Growth Solutions, which manufactures products that increase the concentration of humates in soils. Humates are decomposed plant and animal matter. They add nutrients and improve soil structure.
Earth Smart’s eco-friendly products enhance farm productivity without adding more chemicals. Even if soil contains sufficient nutrients, crop yields are sometimes reduced because the nutrients aren’t getting to the plant.
“When you activate soil microbials, you free bound-up nutrients,” Otto said. “As soon as you do that, they become available to the plant. So instead of boosting yields by putting more chemicals in, you activate microbials in the soil that release nutrients already there. The farmer boosts the crop without using more inputs.”
In other cases, poor soil can be made productive. Otto used hard-packed land on his family’s nearby Tangle Ridge Ranch as an example.
“Our products loosened the soil,” he said. “The nutrients that are already in the soil then became active, allowing land that had previously been marginal pasture to became healthy grassland.”
The Earth Smart facility in Okotoks can produce 16,000 litres of product a day, and also markets online in batches as small as two-litre bottles and as large as 1,000-litre totes. You can view their full line at earth-smart-solutions.com.
