When Stefan Zehetner’s father, Eduard, emigrated from Europe to Canada in 1986, the soil on his family’s farm in Austria was dead.

“It was a sugarbeet farm and on a very tight rotation. They’d plow the farm two to three times a year,” Stefan says. “When my father left he said there were no earthworms and it was getting pretty hard to work with. The yields weren’t anywhere near what they were when my grandfather was farming.”

Shortly after Ed left Europe, the sugarbeet factory closed and his grandparents returned to a regular rotation that included cover crops. As Stefan visited his family in Austria over the years, he noticed the improvements that occurred on the farm.

“It can produce more corn than we can here, and it wouldn’t have been that way 20 years ago,” he says. “We watched that turn around over there and said, ‘We should be doing something like that here, too.’”

After seeing cover crops also work in South America, Australia and New Zealand, Stefan decided to purchase some cover crop seed for himself and his neighbors in Hensall, Ontario, eventually turning it into a full cover crop seed business.

Five years later, Stefan now sells…