Fertile Ground USA...Celebrating the people behind the plow

After his presentation at SARE's conference, people swarmed around Matt Freund of Freund’s Farm Market in East Canaan, Connecticut like, well, flies on dung. But his dung is sweet smelling. Or rather, his latest greatest invention, CowPots, made out of cow manure, has virtually no smell at all. As second-generation dairy farmers, Matt and his brother Ben were up to their eyeballs in cow patties and wanted to make better use of the stuff in a non-environmentally damaging way. So they became one of the few farms in the country to continuously run a methane digester. It was this technology that led to their idea for CowPots, “dairy fiber pot containers” that go directly into the soil with the plant and fully decompose. They’ve been featured on the Discovery Channel’s show Dirty Jobs and once CNN’s Larry King Live got wind of it [pun intended], their poop was gold. Good stuff.