Much of our food today is grown on large corporate farms, but many of the methods – fertilizers and pesticides – that Big Ag uses are degrading topsoil, making farmland less fertile and our food less nutritious, polluting water and threatening food supplies.
As a student at the University of Central Florida, Sam Baker saw the stark effects of the situation while on a fishing trip at a local lake. Fertilizer run-off had killed all the marine life and left the water with a foul odor.
He and a group of friends at UCF decided to develop an alternative to these damaging substances. Three years of hard work paid off with winning the grand prize in UCF’s new venture competition, The Joust. But that was only the beginning, for what started as a school research project has become a career for Sam and his friends.
He founded Wriggle Brew, an Orlando-based startup aimed at ending fertilizer runoff and soil degradation by replacing polluting petrochemical fertilizers with a novel organic alternative. They now sell their products at 15 locations and online.
Sam and his team continue their research through grants from the City of Orlando, the USDA and the National Science Foundation. From groundbreaking work with bioreactors that can digest styrofoam to machine-learning assisted optimization of energy-generating composters, Sam and his friends are providing competitive, effective products to both large scale ag operations as well as home users.
Find Wriggle Brew on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
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