November 10, 2008

Organic Fertilizer Company Locates HQ in Charleston

Andy Owens  /  Charleston Regional Business Journal

Jonathan Butler has fond memories of visiting his family's farm in Orangeburg County. The Charleston entrepreneur drew on this experience when an opportunity presented itself to invest in a green company that could help rural areas of South Carolina with an environmentally sound product.

The co-founder of one of Charleston's high-tech success stories now owns an interest in a soil conditioning fertilizer company and has located the company's headquarters in Charleston.

Butler, the co-founder of Automated Trading Desk, which Citigroup purchased last year for more than $600 million in cash and stock, said he wanted to remove himself from the software development cycle and do something a little different. "The introduction of clean and green technologies is the next wave of entrepreneurship," Butler said.

Butler joined the board of the Charleston Digital Corridor Foundation, which acted as matchmaker between him and the company that developed the organic fertilizer. The product has been sold overseas for years but had no North American distribution, sales or product placement.

"My obligation is to align all those different issues in such a way that's going to take us to the promised land," said Ernest Andrade, Charleston digital Corridor director. "We're more actively incubating this idea."

He said the city of Charleston has made a specific commitment to facilitate clean industries such as Surya Biofertilizers. "It's all really come together through the Charleston Digital Corridor," Butler said. "We're dealing with an established product. It's a product that's been sold, just not sold here."

The company has three organic fertilizer and soil-conditioning products that it markets as environmentally friendly and cost-effective, providing benefits beyond just being green. Commercial organic fertilizers have been available for a long time, but a cost-effective method that allows higher yields has been elusive in the United States, the company said in a statement. Butler said he has a waiting list of people who want to invest in Surya, including family members, but he's taking the approach he learned at ATD.

"I'm very risk-averse, and I don't just jump into anything without researching it," Butler said. "We're being very cautious. We don't want to overexpand. We'll probably follow the ATD track of underexpanding."

He said the company is still developing partnerships and distribution agreements to implement a retail launch, but the company's products are for sale through Surya Biofertilizers' Web site. Andrade said the company is working with 15 customers right now who are serving as testers for the product, including engineers, farmers, water quality professionals and homeowners. Surya's products have been tested and approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In line with its plan for slow growth, the company plans to add two to three jobs in the Charleston area in the next year to facilitate product placement. Butler said the company plans to eventually build a manufacturing facility in one of the state's more rural counties that could benefit from such a plant. His family owns land in Orangeburg County, but he said he has no definite plans for where such a plant would be located because many variables still exist.

"A clean, green technology is the focus," Butler said. "This is really something that's going to be long-term. This is something I want my kids to be involved in."

Reach Andy Owens at 849-3141.