Welcome to Sustainability Now, an exploration of technologies and paradigms to shape a world that works. Designed for socially conscious entrepreneurs and individuals interested in responsible stewardship of the planet, Sustainability Now covers food, energy, housing, water, waste, health, economics, and consciousness.
Welcome to your community, Sustainability Now, with your host, Mira Rubin.
Mira: Welcome everybody to Sustainability Now. Technologies and paradigms to shape a world that works. I’m your host, Mira Rubin, and today, I am delighted to introduce you to Mike Cox.
With a long and distinguished career in microbiology, Mike is the Founder and CEO of Anaerobe Systems, a microbiology manufacturing and research company. Also an inventor, Mike holds patents on breakthrough technologies to prepare anaerobic culture media in a completely oxygen-free environment as well as technology to convert biomass into hydrogen and organic fertilizers.
Mike is currently evaluating the use of invasive aquatic plants to produce fertilizers and hydrogen while removing toxic agricultural fertilizers from the waterways.
Mira: Mike, it is such a privilege to have you here with us today. Welcome. Welcome. Thanks for being here.
Mike: Well, it’s really an honor to be connected with you, Mira. I really am impressed with how much you’ve done to connect people, and those connections are growing every day.
Mira: Thank you for that. Wow, you know that is actually one of the missions for Sustainability Now, is is meeting all these extraordinary people like yourself in the world doing wonderful things and making connections. We’ve been really graced to find people making business associations. It’s really been a treat. I’m glad to have you as part of that wonderful group of people that are making such a difference in the world. So it’s a mutual admiration society here, Mike.
Mira: So I want to say first that it’s fascinating to me that you discovered this whole new technology for creating fertilizer, which we’re going to get into. But in a search to create hydrogen. Isn’t that the truth?
Mike: That is the truth. You know, when I worked in a clinical lab, there’s certain anaerobic bacteria that produce a lot of hydrogen and, as a matter of fact, we had blood culture bottles that would explode due to all the hydrogen – I mean just because of the pressure in the bottle. So, I knew that these organisms were very fast growers and produced hydrogen. So I set out to, when we had the first energy crisis, to see if I could make hydrogen from biomass. And the first time I tried it, it worked.
Mira: Wow. So this was hydrogen for fuel. You were looking to solve a fuel issue and your experience with microbiology allowed you to find an innovative solution. That’s awesome. Would you do us a favor, just to clarify? You talked about anaerobic bacteria.
Mike: Right.
Mira: Can you just define that so people understand what that is and and give us a context?
Mike: Yeah, okay. So, anaerobic bacteria are bacteria that cannot live in the presence of oxygen. They’re killed by oxygen. They were the first inhabitants of Earth, and in 1890, we learned that anaerobic bacteria were free-living nitrogen-fixing organisms.
On Earth, anaerobic life outweighs all other life by a factor of 10. You have 10 times more anaerobic bacteria in your body than you have human cells and these organisms are critical in your health and sometimes, most of the time, they’re good for you. And they make vitamins. They help you digest your food. They detoxify bile acids. And then there’s some bad ones.
The soil is almost entirely anaerobic. Anaerobic bacteria are the most prominent life form on earth, and they’ve been here forever. And they play an enormous role in our whole biological economy.
I have to tell you, I knew I could make hydrogen from anaerobes right away. But then when you looked at the process, I have to heat-sterilize the material before I start. All the other scientists had already knew this and told me I’d never be able to do what I’m doing because you have to put 10 times the amount of heat in as the amount of heat you’d get back from the hydrogen. So it was a negative. It was a negative process.
Mira: Because of the sterilization?
Mike: The amount of heat I’d have to spend to get it sterile was ten times more than the amount of energy I’d get back.
But one day a friend of mine who runs a very large farm was here when I was cleaning out a fermenter, and he said he saw this brown junk there and he said, “Can I get something? I want to send it out for soil analysis.” And I said, “Sure.” So he came back to me later and said, “You know I’m paying five dollars a gallon for that stuff you’re throwing away.” So he’s been taking it. I’ve been making it and giving it to him, and he’s increased his farm output considerably. They also have a lot of mushroom houses and so he takes our liquid fertilizer – thousands of gallons of it — and uses it to supplement the mushroom compost and makes much better compost with our liquid fertilizer.
The funny thing is a lot of people had tried to do what I’m doing, but knowing the cost of the sterilization they tried to skip sterilization. And it absolutely will not work unless you kill all the other (organisms.) Every microbe on the planet wants hydrogen and so if you have other organisms there they’ll steal your hydrogen so you won’t get any hydrogen.
So it was interesting, because when I filed for my patent on this process, the patent office rejected it as being obvious. But then we provided him a Department of Energy publication which clearly stated that you could not do it and the patent reviewer said, “Well if does say you can’t do it, it’s not obvious.” Yeah, I guess it’s not.
Mira: I guess not, so why were they saying that you can’t do it?
Mike: Oh, well, the thermodynamic inefficiencies. The cost of the fuel crops. The amount of land it would take to grow the fuel crops. These are all reasons they listed. They don’t realize that everything I’m using is crop residues that are being thrown away at a cost in fact. Someone asked me a couple of days ago how much it would cost in this process to make hydrogen if we didn’t have the offset of the fertilizer and ends up being 103 dollars a kilogram.
Mira: Wow.
Mike: So clearly not doable.
Mira: So interesting. I think it would be great if you could talk about what the process is because what started out being an intention to focus on hydrogen creation ended up being an intention to focus on fertilizer and soil remediation or soil nourishment with a byproduct of hydrogen. Is that accurate?
Mike: That’s right. The money is the fertilizer. The excitement is the hydrogen.
Mira: Gotcha. Well, I don’t know, the excitement to me is to be able to have a non-petroleum-based or non-fossil-fuel-based fertilizer that is wholesome. Let’s call it wholesome fertilizer. That’s pretty exciting to me, too, actually because I know how important it is to restore our soils and our farmlands. Right?
Mike: Yeah and one of the things I want to make sure that everyone realizes this: three percent of the entire earth’s energy supply and sixty percent of all the hydrogen produced is used to make fertilizer.
Mira: Wow.
Mike: And so the interesting thing is our organisms we’re using are free-living nitrogen-producing bacteria and they can completely replace that fossil-based nitrogen fertilizer.
Mira: That’s extraordinary. So, you know, the thing that excites me about what you’re up to is that it, as I said earlier, it solves so many problems and one of the biggest problems on the planet right now, in terms of global warming or climate change, is food waste.
And so I would like to walk through the process of what you’re doing to create this fertilizer and hydrogen as a byproduct.
But one of the things that you’re doing is taking something that was designated as waste and re-christening it as fuel and that’s really the foundation of the idea of circular economy. And so, please talk about what exactly is this process that you’re generating these wonderful products from including hydrogen and the fertilizers.
Mike: Yeah. So Morgan Hill is right in the middle of the food-growing region in the United States. Taylor Food is here and, you know, they make…
Mira: I’m sorry. Let me just interrupt you for a second. Morgan Hill where?
Mike: Morgan Hill, California.
Mira: Gotcha.
Mike: And we’re in the lettuce basket. Taylor Farms, who has the lettuce and the little plastic boxes in your grocery store, throws away 350 tons of lettuce a week — I mean a day. My friends at Kalos throw away 100 tons of bell peppers a day and my friends at the Dole Foods throw away 100 tons of cabbage and lettuce a day.
And we’re working at the moment because we can’t handle that quantity. But we’re working with a carrot processor and they have about five tons of carrot peel pulp and about 10,000 gallons of carrot peel water a day and we get that material from them.
We get seven tons of that material from them twice a week and we pump it into our fermenter tanks and heat sterilize it. And then we cool it down and inoculate it with a microbe. And the next day it is product; it’s hydrogen and fertilizer. And then we send that material through a decanter centrifuge and we separate the liquid and the solids and the liquid goes in those 250-gallon IBC totes. You know the ones that have the steel cage around them? Then the solids we blend with two parts of biochar and we make a product called FermiChar which sells for about thirty dollars a cubic foot. It’s just spectacular in terms of making plants grow. So, we’re now CDFA organic certified and we have one farm at the moment that’s buying everything we produce. He’s got 1400 acres of Chinese vegetables. He’s buying no other fertilizer now and he says, “I have better crops than I’ve ever had.”
Mira: Wow. Well, would you tell us what is CDFA certified? CDFA Certification. What does that mean?
Mike: Well CDFA’s—I’m sorry; California Department of Food and Agriculture.
They’re the ones that would bless you as being organic in California.
Mira: Okay, great.
Mike: We’re going after the OMRI which is the Organic Materials Research Institute. You know, that’s a national, or and I guess an international, designation on organic. We bring spinach and kale and peppers and cauliflower and grass clippings and mustard plants from beside the road and
grape hummus. Where the carrot is just so easy because the carrot peel pulp comes to us looking kind of like mashed potatoes, so we don’t have to grind it and we get three tons of the peel pulp and four tons of the peel water and we just let that water run into the solids and we have a pump that pumps it into the end of the tank and it’s, you know, a 45-minute no-work process.
Mira: That’s awesome because you don’t need to use any water then.
Mike: What’s that?
Mira: I said that using the peel pulp and the water, or the carrot water, means that you don’t have to use any additional water in your process.
Mike: No, and you know my friends at Dole Food produce a million gallons of gray water a day, which they switch trees, and it’s gray water because that water has been contaminated with lettuce and cabbage juice.
Mira: That’s crazy. Wouldn’t that be awesome? You have an endless water supply too.
Mike: And yeah and so they have 65 acres of wastewater management. Taylor has about 150 acres of wastewater management. My friends at Kalos have 35 acres of water wastewater management and they have big blowers, you know, that are aerating that to make it aerobically digest. So 100 percent of the carbon ends up going into the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas.
Mira: How would you be able to pair these food production places that have all this waste with these fermenter tanks and your technology?
Mike: Initially when I talked to Taylor Farms, they said, “We love what you’re doing but we don’t want any of that stuff on our property.”
Mira: Because they’re afraid of the contamination based on the past performance.
Mike: Right.
Mira: But is there the same risk of contamination with your process?
Mike: Well, the other thing that happens is these food processing plants are
under extreme control on food safety. My friends at Kalos sell to hundreds. They sell the Busch Beans and Campbell Soup and Nestle and they all want to know everything that you’re doing on your piece of property.
Mira: Gotcha.
Mike: And they don’t, you know, that’s what they explained to me. He said we don’t know if we can explain this to Costco or we don’t know if we could explain this to Nestle; what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. And you know the organisms we’re using are clostridia. Ever heard of Clostridium botulinum? Botulism?
Mira: Okay, thank you. So you’re using botulism bacteria. You don’t want that right near a food processing plant.
Mike: So we’re not using the clostridium botulinum, we’re using other clostridia. There’s a half a dozen clostridia that are nasty pathogens. The ones we’re using are not and they have been certified by EPA as being safe.
Mira: So, I think that’s the foundational difference between this other experiment that went horribly wrong is they didn’t sterilize and they also didn’t decide how to consciously culture this material that they were working with, right?
Mike: And they put a nasty anaerobic digester right next to their food processing facility.
Mira: Okay, and so…
Mike: That would probably steer customers away from them.
Mira: Yeah, I would think so. I would think it would. It would.
Mike: Yeah. So you can see, as a matter of fact, if I’m talking to someone brand new and I say, “Clostridium,” they say, “not on my property.” I can almost tell you the way this is gonna unfold.
Mira: Okay.
Mike: We’re gonna set up our little plant and get it running, and then someone’s going to come along and say we need a bigger one and what we’ll do at that point is go put it on a site of its own and it will become a co-op facility to bring material from Dole and from Taylor and from Kalos and all to that one place, and then we’ll turn around and sell it back to them. That’ll be stage two and then as this proceeds and people start being impressed with this beautiful facility that looks like a classy winery; it’s not a stinky anaerobic digester. Then they’re going to say, “Well, you know, it would really be good from our sustainability picture to have one of these facilities at our place.” The nice thing is I’m making fertilizer, and they are buying it, and they’re liking it.
Mira: That’s awesome that’s a huge start and and it would be great if that will supplant the commercial fertilizers that are fossil-fuel based. That would be amazing.
Mike: Great. I have to tell you, I am not worried about anyone copying me because the size of the opportunity is so huge that no matter how many people get into it, there’s too much work to do and that needs to be done.
Mira: Beautiful and actually, that’s a great segue back because you were telling us some of these statistics about the food waste from these companies that are right around you where you are and all of these tons and tons and tons
Of food remnants that they’re throwing away on a daily basis. My question is where is the “away” that they’re throwing these things to? I mean, where is it going?
Mike: Well, for a while it went to cattle feed, and they’ve stopped that because, you know, a lot of this is pretty moist and you know it tends to get out there and rot and draws flies. And the second thing is the truck that goes to the field to dump some bell pepper parts runs over cow doo. At that point, it cannot go back to a food processing plant.
Mira: Oh boy. Okay.
Mike: So it’s a whole food safety issue, and there may be some more mischief going because starting next year anything over four cubic yards a week of organic must be hauled by a certified waste hauler and it has to go under organic waste.
Mira: It has to go under organic waste.
Mike: Yeah, it has to it has to go under chain of custody. So how many pounds went on which truck? Where that truck went. What was the final disposition of this material?
A friend of mine works for a large grocery store called Albertsons, and I was asking him if he heard of SB 1383 and he said, “That’s my job.” He said when that goes into effect it’s going to cost us billions of dollars.
Mira: To get this waste hauled.
Mike: Right.
Mira: How is it being disposed of currently?
Mike: Most of it is being composted.
Mira: Okay.
Mike: And I don’t know if you know, but I’m not a fan of composting.
Mira: I do not know! Share that please because well that seems like such a great solution.
MIke: Yeah. Well, our process finishes a compost cycle in one day. What you’d consider to the compost cycle in one day. We release no greenhouse gas
and we contaminate no water. And composting 60 of the carbon and
the compost process is released as greenhouse gas and it has a huge capacity to contaminate the groundwater.
Mira: Wow and so this is a revelation.
Mike: So we beat compost. I don’t like to call my process composting because there’s tons of nasty regulations if you’re composting. But in our situation we have a closed system and all the CO2 that’s being produced in the process, the gas is two-thirds hydrogen and one-third carbon dioxide. And we scrub out the carbon dioxide with potassium hydroxide and we make it into potassium carbonate fertilizer which is the best potassium fertilizer you can buy. Then we have pure hydrogen and then all the liquid in the tank is our FermiGrow liquid fertilizer and all the solids is our FermiChar, our solid soil amendment.
Mira: Why did you decide to separate the liquid and the solids?
Mike: Oh, well, quick and easy is most of the people are using ours are putting it through drip irrigation. It has to be, you know, particulate-free. (Otherwise,) It’ll stop up the sprinklers and thedrip irrigation. And then the solids just become a beautiful soil amendment when we mix it with a biochar. And again, our little green bucket goes for twenty dollars
Mira: Actually so, this is sort of a pilot project that you’re engaged in right now.
Like a proof of concept?
Mike: Let me expand on that, too, because I’ve had this process going for over 20 years. And one of the big food processing plants here, I mean we’re almost members of the family, we’re really close. I have pestered them for 20 years to put in a plant like this, and they wouldn’t do it. I wanted them to to take their 50 to 100 tons of bell pepper waste a day and then they also have 200,000 gallons of vegetable soup a day that they’re sewage treating. If you saw this plant, it’s a 40-acre site, a two-acre processing plant, and 35 acres of waste treatment.
Mira: It’s craziness. It’s craziness.
Mike: Well, it’s an opportunity missed. They, and several others I talked to, they would always come back around with, “well who else is doing it?” and I said nobody. They said it must be something wrong. And so I decided that’s what I’m doing at the moment. I’m building a 5,000 square feet R & D building that will be, the whole site, about 20,000 square feet and that will produce about 10 million dollars worth of organic fertilizer and hydrogen per year on 20,000 square feet. So it’s going to be a beautiful facility to look like a high-class winery with all stainless steel tanks and computer screens on the walls and a nice conference room and a training center. At that point, they’ll walk through the door and they say, “You’re making 10 million dollars a year in this 12-car garage?” and I say yeah. I said well I got a lot bigger space so that’s why I’m doing this.
Mike: Once we started making and selling fertilizer everyone says, “Yeah I want to get into that” and they actually see the value. We did actual field trials. I paid $25,000 to have a field trial done and the two lettuce we did came in at 11.5 percent better than conventional fertilizer and the cauliflower was 34.7 percent bigger than the conventional. We were half the price of conventional. We were organic and they weren’t.
Mira: All pluses. All in the winning column there. You said that this facility that you’re building will be producing about 10 million dollars a year. What kind of investment are you looking at for that return?
Mike: About three million dollars.
Mira: So a three million dollar investment to turn into 10 million dollars within the 10 million dollars of revenue within the first year, right? Now that is based on this huge fertilizer market, correct?
Mike: Right.
Mira: So the fertilizer market, I think I read that it’s hundreds of billions of dollars is it?
Mike: 200 billion
Mira: 200 billion dollars and this is fossil-fuel-based fertilizer. The question I have for you, we talked a little bit about regenerative agriculture and it sounds like these products that you’re producing are very much in line with regenerative restoration of the soil, yes?
Mike: It is. And so, you know, 100 of the carbon in our feedstock ends up in the ground as ground carbon. I mean it ends up back in the ground as carbon and part of it just becomes, you know, building the humus of soil and then some of it becomes primary nutrients to the plants.
Mira: So you’re taking food waste which is an abomination, the amount of food waste that there is, and you’ve re-christened it. I thought this was brilliant actually because you said you’re gonna have this new bill passing which is going to be charging for the processing of this food waste and the hauling of it and it sounds like a lot of bureaucracy around it and instead of calling this same material “food waste” you’re calling it “fuel-grade produce.”
Mike: Right.
Mira: And brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
Mira: And, I just, the thing about that that stirs me so deeply is by a simple twist of phrase, you are addressing one of the biggest problems that we face on the planet right now. Where we have food waste, you’re turning it into this source, this resource, which is what it is. Everything is a resource, we just maybe didn’t find the use for yet, right?
Mike: Right. We’re actually paying the people we get this material from we’re paying them ten dollars a ton for it. so that it is a commodity
Mira: Right, so that you can call it fuel-grade produce.
Mike: Right and so we paid ten dollars a ton for that carrot and three days later we sell it for two thousand dollars a ton.
Mira: Remarkable. Wow. What a conversion rate. So, not only are you solving some serious global problems, but you’re also keeping the CO2 out of the air and the pollution of the water that would occur from composting. You’re creating an incredible financial opportunity. You’re also creating a wonderful soil supplement. What is unique about your process?
Mike: I think the big thing that’s unique on ours is the speed by which it happens. There’s one of our competitors is AggroThrive and they basically ferment fish waste and some corn-steeped liquor. But their process takes 21 days and we’re done in a day. And I think also, somewhat unique, is these free-living nitrogen fixers that are in our formula. That’s a big player. And then our organisms are making a bunch of short-chain organic acids and these are all primary feedstocks for a plant. I mean instant uptake.
Mira: The fact that you’re doing this fermentation process in two days versus 21 days is it because of the bacteria you’re using?
Mike: Right, yeah. The two we’re using have a double time of 15 minutes and you start with one cell and it doubled every 15 minutes it reaches the size of the earth in 20 31 hours.
Mira: Wow.
Mike: And the anaerobic digesters, which I call hunter-gatherer technology, the methanogens that are in there have a double time of 37 hours versus 15 minutes so you can see and then the anaerobic digesters take 20 to 30 days and make dirty methane and sewage.
Mira: So can you talk a little bit more about that? Because we’re hearing more and more about anaerobic digesters and your your process is fermentation.
MIke: Right.
Mira: What’s different? Can you just educate us about that?
Mike: Yeah. I actually, I’m using the both of them are fermentation, but they call theirs a digester. And I’m glad they do, because I distinguish myself by calling ours, and you generally think about fermentation as being, a scientific product process where you have defined feedstocks and defined organisms producing a defined product. The anaerobic digesters basically they take everything and throw it in the pot and then they take whatever they get. So there was no control over which organisms were there and very little control over what the feedstock was and so you end up with a dirty product with a dirty methane. And one of the big food processors here in California actually set up an anaerobic digester and two fuel cells and they spent $10.8 million and the dirty gas from the anaerobic digester killed the two fuel cells.
Mira: Wow.
Mike: And they were very very proud of all what they’re doing. They’re all over the news when it first happened. Then recently, I looked at Google Earth and their fuel cells are gone. I’ve also heard from them that the system had failed. That’s another thing that’s kind of negative for me because all these food processing plants I’ve been talking to know about that failure.
Mira: Let’s be really really explicit about what the differences are. So one is that you’re more discerning about the feedstock that you’re using?
Mike: Yeah well and I think the biggest single thing is we sterilize everything before we start.
Mira: Okay.
Mike: I could take the same thing going into the anaerobic digester and sterilize it and end up with our quality of product.
Mira: Okay.
Mike: In one day.
Mira: Wow. And now the sterilization takes a day?
Mike: Well, right now it does because I have a big tank and a small boiler, but in the new building that’ll only take about three hours to heat it and about three hours to cool it. Right at the moment my setup it takes me a day to sterilize it a day to cool it
Mira: okay.
Mike: And so then we then we inoculate it and it takes a day to ferment and then then the next day we harvest it.
Mira: Okay, so right now you’re working on a four-day process, but ultimately it’ll be two days. Is that right?
Mike: Yeah.
Mira: Wow.
Mike: Yeah, I’ve already bought a bigger boiler and it’s sitting in storage. I just got in all the pavers for my new parking lot and I’m meeting with the architect tomorrow to finalize a couple more details.
Mira: So well that’s pretty exciting and you’ve bootstrapped this whole thing yourself, right?
Mike: Right.
Mike: That in and of itself is remarkable. So clearly you have a side gig that is your main gig.
Mike: Well, you know, we’re the only company in the world that makes the culture media the way we do and we’re considered the standard of the industry. I mean we’re number one in anaerobic microbiology in
the world. We have, you know, all the big names you know: Johns
Hopkins, Harvard, and Mayo Clinic. All those people are our customers.
Mira: So what are you producing for them?
Mike: Petri plates and test tubes. You know, anaerobic bacteria cause a lot of human infections, dental infections, veterinary infections, and so when people get these infections they have to get a swab and plate it out on petri plates and see why it grows and determine which antibiotic you could use to treat it.
Mira: So you’re providing the medium?
Mike: Yeah, you know the diagnostic tools. We have about 250 different various diagnostic tools and then we also make and sell the anaerobe chambers.
Mira: Gotcha. Gotcha. So this is your work and your passion.
Mira: You really cover the gamut where you’re dealing with food waste which there really is no such thing you’ve proven that you’re creating hydrogen fuel, you are creating remediation for the soil, you’re creating a really marvelous financial model and there’s a tremendous opportunity for other people. So what if somebody said, “Okay I’m in. This is pushing all my buttons. I want in on this.”? How would somebody get involved with you to be able to move forward?
Mike: Well, we have a setup where we would license the technology and then we have a huge engineering and construction company. They’ve actually built out most of like Genentex and Bayer and you know all their fermentation technology and they know how to do that. And so we would hire that company to go and design the facility and build it and also do the online maintenance. And then our model is we would charge that person under the licensing agreement. We would charge them fifty dollars a ton for every time they they ran through the plant. These plants run on Siemens automation software and I can look at my iPhone at any moment and know how much they owe me.
Mira: So for that fifty dollars that they’re paying you for every time that they run through the system what kind of money would that represent for them?
Mike: About two thousand dollars a ton.
Mira: That’s incredible.
Mira: So I have a question for you because we are concerned about sustainability. You talked about the amount of heat that needs to be utilized to be able to to sterilize the tanks. Is there any scenario where you might be able to use the captured hydrogen to be heating those tanks or is there a way to make this loop carbon-negative, in other words?
Mike: Yeah. There’s a whole bunch of opportunities. For instance my friend at Kalos, their new plant has 10 million btu of heat going out the top of the building every hour. This just and so you could use that as co-generation and have, you know, 100 times more heat we’d need for the process. So there’s a lot of those kind of opportunities. The other thing, properly designed, you shouldn’t be buying more than 20 percent new heat. We have to heat it and then we have to cool it and if you were smart you’d let your next batch of raw material be the cooling medium for the one that you’re cooling and you just transfer that heat into that new batch coming in. Now, you can’t get it all, but you could get probably 80 percent of that heat transferred over. And then it turns out that, at the moment, heats probably a tenth of a percent of our operating cost. I mean a 10th percent of our revenue is heat so it’s insignificant to start with.
Mira: Interesting. Okay.
Mike: But again, if hydrogen is the only thing I’m producing, then the heat is prohibitive.
Mira: Yeah. Right, right. But in this scenario it’s almost like the hydrogen’s free it’s just a bonus.
Mike: One other thing I think I haven’t touched on but it’s very important. In the fertilizer business, almost all the potassium fertilizer used in the United States comes from Saskatchewan Canada.
Mira. That’s interesting.
Mike: And that involves a lot of diesel.
Mira: Yeah, yeah.
Mike: And almost all the phosphorus used in the United States comes from an environmental disaster in Florida and they have permanently ruined around 350,000 square miles of, or I don’t know, don’t hold me that. But you can go and look around Tampa and St. Petersburg and find these massive pieces of of ground that have been ripped up and piles of tailings. And that land is permanently unusable.
Mira: I’m gonna say now we say permanently unusable, but hopefully we will come up with solutions.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So, at any rate, the phosphorus is coming from Florida and to California. That’s a lot of diesel. And 60 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer is coming from Russia and the Middle East.
Mira: In our conversation previously, you said that this person that you’re selling all of your supplement to said, “This is better than any fertilizer out there,” and you made a distinction for me, which I thought was really interesting, and that was the distinction between plant food and fertilizer.
Mike: Right, yeah. Because he told me one day that he’d put it on on Monday and by Wednesday he saw a big pop and I said, “Jeremy, I didn’t think fertilizers could work that fast” and he said, “Well, you don’t know anything about farming. Your stuff isn’t fertilizer, it’s plant food and they uptake it immediately.” Something else he taught me is the NPK – the nitrogen-, phosphorus-potassium fertilizer – think of those as tools that plants use to make food. If you give them the meals ready-to-eat, they don’t need nearly as much. They don’t need near as many tools.
Mira: Okay, so your plant food – you’ve been calling it fertilizer, but I’m going to call it plant food. Your plant food makes it so that they don’t need the fertilizers that, I mean, it’s…
Mike: Actually, in the field trial we did, there was no NPK applied whatsoever. And if you look at the NPK values on our label, it’s extremely low being like 0.12-0.13 -0.16. Way down there. The stuff that we were going against was a 15-15-15. Then the other interesting thing is in the crops fertilized with FermiGrow there were tons of earthworms, and in the ones with the synthetic, there were no earthworms. My consultant says the nitro-synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is toxic to earthworms and a lot of soil-positive organisms.
Mira: So that is that fossil-fuel founded or fossil-fuel-based fertilizers that you’re talking about?
Mike: Well the friend, you know again, that owns this big pepper-processing plant also owns a lot of farmland and he started off farming with synthetics and he said it took him 15 years to totally destroy his soil. With our organisms they’re free-living nitrogen fixture, so they just live in the root zone. And once again, and this is very important, the plant sends a purchase order for x amount of nitrogen, the microbe gets paid with this exudate and produces x amount of nitrogen. Not 20x Not 2x. X.
Mira: Brilliant.
Mike: And the beauty of that is this nitrogen is one way. It does not go to the river; it only goes to the plant. And this is really, really an important point when you’re thinking about the problem; that synthetic nitrogen running off into the rivers and growing water hyacinths like crazy. I didn’t mention the water hyacinths. Water hyacinth is one of the feedstocks we want to use. At the moment, that weed does 120 billion dollars in damage in the US every year.
Mira: What areas of the country? Because I’m on the East Coast and I’m not aware of what it is.
Mike: Well in California it’s horrible and then all through Texas and Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. There’s places in the world where people were very dependent on a river for transportation, for water, and for fishing. The water hyacinth shows up and takes all of that away from them.
Mira: Okay.
Mike: They can’t travel. I’ve got a picture of Vietnam of people where they tie their boats end-to-end across the river and they’re walking across their boats because the boats can’t move. So the water hyacinths will grow to about 200 tons per acre.
MIra: Wow.
Mike: And so two thousand dollars a ton is what we could get for it, you could afford to hire the people on the machinery and to go harvest it. It has a double time of seven to ten days.
Mira: Oh my gosh, that’s crazy.
Mike: And so if you realize what a pest it could be but on the other hand you can realize what a fantastic productive bioenergy creature you have.
Mira: Yeah.
Mike: Water hyacinths have free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its floating roots. So what’s important about that is the water hyacinth I told you is growing at 200 tons per acre. There is not enough nitrogen in any river to support that so they’re making their own nitrogen. Now, what’s next important about that is when they go their primary way of controlling it is spraying it with herbicides, and so it ate all the nitrogen in the river then it produced a thousand times more, and you just sprayed it, and you’re going to let it rot and release all that nitrogen into the river.
Mira: Gotcha
Mike: That’s not good.
Mira: Right.
Mike: Yeah. So the way to handle the water hyacinths is you need to harvest it and make hydrogen run the harvesting boats on hydrogen fuel cells.
Mira: You have to process a lot of water hyacinths to get the hydrogen to run the boats though, right?
Mike: Well, 200 tons per acre you’d have 400 kilograms of hydrogen per acre which would run that boat for 20 days.
Mira: Okay.
Mike: Per acre.
Mira: And then the hyacinths, once they’re cleared, they come back how quickly?
Mike: Well, they, the one thing is their seeds are good for 20 years.
Mira: Wow.
Mike: Even though you clear it they pop right back. I think it’s, I still say, it’s probably one of the largest natural resources in existence in the United States and much more valuable than the oil wells.
Mira: Interesting. That’s really interesting and, you know, it’s a simple shift
of perspective that makes all the difference. So when you’re recognizing this as a powerful fuel, just like you’re recognizing the fuel grade produce, right?
Mike: Yeah and you know that, as I mentioned, the plant doubles every seven to ten days and when it’s growing it is consuming carbon dioxide like crazy. It’s a carbon dioxide sponge. It’s just soaking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Mira: That’s awesome.
Mike: And then when we produce, when we process it, 100 of that carbon goes back into the soil.
Mira: I’m hearing what you’re saying. Yes.
Mike: This isn’t this isn’t rocket science. It’s fairly obvious that it happens.
Mira: Well, you know it’s obvious because you’re looking at it differently. You’re not looking at it as waste. You’re looking at it as fuel, right? And when we shift our perspective, the whole world changes. And that’s exactly that kind of shift that we need now more than ever, is to be recognizing even plastic. Plastic is an untapped fuel source. We just haven’t figured out how to use it yet.
Mike: Right. This water hyacinth is just there for the taking. You don’t need to buy anything. And the State of California has told me straight out if you will give us an address we will harvest it and bring it to you for free.
Mira: Really? Did you give them your address?
Mike: Well, yeah. California is spending about a hundred million dollars a year on water hyacinth remediation at the moment. They have several contractors that they hire to do it and then they have other people that they hire just to go out and spray roundup on the river.
Mira: A horror show.
Mike: Yes, it was funny. When I had a meeting with the Director of California Parks and Recreation, I mentioned something about I’d tried some and she said, “Where did you get it?” And I said, well I got it from Eddie Hart who was the guy in charge. I mean he was on the phone thing too and he said well that was a long time ago.
Mira: So what? The water hyacinth?
Mike: Yeah, yeah. I broke the law. So it’s against the law to transport that plant across the county line. So I had broken the law. So then we continued the discussion. They said well if you’ve already tested, I don’t see why we need to do any more. And I said, “Well we just did a quick dip in the bucket. We didn’t really count labor costs and this cost. We need to do something that’s really comprehensive to define the value of the opportunity and we actually want to be supervised by you because I want to stop smuggling water hyacinth.”
Mira: You don’t want to be a water hyacinth criminal.
Mike: So they laughed and then at that point, the conversation turned. They said it would be good to get that data. And so I’m working with Congressman Jerry McNerney and Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren to get this moving but you know right now it’s hard to get anything moving with the whole pandemic but it’s something we’re going to do. I just want to do 20 tons a week for six weeks and then define, you know, what the cost is to get it, and what the cost is the process it, and what’s value of the end product. One of the things that surprised them when I mentioned the fact that when they spray it, they’re actually just fertilizing the river so it grows more and they said, “Never thought of that.”
Mira: Oh, man. You wonder who’s advising people you know?
Mike: So at any rate the the size of the opportunity is endless.
Mira. Yeah.
Mike: It’s just endless. We made some hydrogen out of pomegranates.
Mira: Yes, I saw your video. Yeah, very funny.
MIke: Yeah and you can see how straightforward that was. You could see every step of the way, of us collecting the hydrogen, and filling a little car with hydrogen.
MIra: We’ll put a link to that on our website so folks can take a look at it on the page with your interview.
Mira: I think what you have come up with is brilliant and I’m glad to hear that there are so many other companies that you have a lot of competition. Yeah, you know, that’s a good thing.
Mike: Well and there’s everyone’s rushing into this, so put the biology back in the soil.
Mira: Right
Mike: It’s a very easy sell at the moment.
Mira: That’s a good thing.
Mike: Yeah, fortunately, we, at the moment, have the best prices going and, we think, one of the best products going. And again. everything of our input is something somebody has to throw away.
Mira: Yeah, yeah. Which that’s critical. That’s actually the critical piece.
Mira: So, Mike, is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t ask you?
Mike: I think we covered everything about this subject.
Mira: Well, great, and I just want to say thank you so much for being with us. You’re such a wealth of knowledge, and the technology that you’re pioneering is wonderful, and I’m wondering if you would just give us a contact for you again for folks that might be interested.
Mike: Right, it’s mcox@anaerobesystems.com
Mira: I just want to say thanks so much for being with us. It’s been a great pleasure.
Mike: It was really an honor, and again I want to thank you for what you’re doing because my wife and I both have totally opened our eyes in the two sessions we’ve been in so far.
Mira: Oh, thank you. That’s great. What Mike’s referring to is that every Thursday night we have a movie night and it takes place on Zoom. If you’re interested in our movie night it’s from 7:00 to 9:00 pm Eastern and you can register for our email list on our website at sustainabilitynow.global and then you’ll get notifications of our movie night. So looking forward to having you join us.
That’s it for today and I want to say thank you to my Co-Founder Scott Billy and all of you who are carrying the torch for creating a world that works.
Until next time, live your best life, love the world around you, and together we can save the world.
Thank you for listening to Sustainability Now solutions to shape a world that works. Visit sustainabilitynow.global for resources related to today’s program.
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