Sedron® brings Kinnard Farms Varcor Facility fully online, expanding domestic supply of patented organic nitrogen fertilizer

CASCO – Sedron, which develops and operates facilities that upcycle municipal biosolids and agricultural manure, has announced that its Varcor® facility at Kinnard Farms in Casco is fully operational, after Congressman Tony Wied (R-Wis.), who represents the state’s 8th Congressional District, joined the Kinnard family and Sedron leadership on Oct. 6 for a nameplate ceremony marking the facility’s completion. The facility converts manure from the 9,000-cow dairy into an OMRI Listed liquid ammonium nitrate fertilizer and clean water, and it came online on the schedule Sedron set when installation began last year.

All Varcor units at Kinnard Farms came online in August. The system takes digestate from the farm’s anaerobic digesters and separates it into three streams: a concentrated liquid ammonium nitrate fertilizer, clean water and dry solids. The liquid product is the only OMRI Listed ammonium nitrate fertilizer on the market and supplies nitrogen in both ammonium and nitrate forms. For Kinnard Farms, the facility replaces the hauling and land application of 120 million gallons of liquid manure a year, which the farm says will take tens of thousands of manure truck trips off local roads.

“We’ve been working toward this for years, and the system is doing exactly what Sedron said it would,” said Lee Kinnard of Kinnard Farms. “The reclaimed nutrients pay for the facility, we get the water back, and our neighbors see fewer trucks on the road. That’s what being a good steward looks like now.”

The fertilizer is available to growers and distributors nationally in 7 percent nitrogen and 10 percent nitrogen grades, produced at Sedron’s facilities in Wisconsin and Indiana, and a 16 percent grade is OMRI Listed and expected to be available for the 2028 growing season. Sedron holds multiple U.S. patents on the process, including two covering the slurry-processing system (U.S. Patents 11,772,987 and 12,467,687) and two covering the production of ammonium nitrate from it (U.S. Patents 12,365,864 and 12,577,523), the most recent granted in March 2026. The nitrogen is recovered from ammonia already present in manure, most of which would otherwise be lost to the air, and converted by a biological process into a stable ammonium nitrate form; nothing is chemically synthesized. The product gives growers a domestic, year-round source of organic nitrogen that does not depend on natural gas prices or import channels, with the year-over-year supply and consistency that organic crop inputs have rarely offered.

“Organic growers have never had a nitrogen source they could count on year after year,” said Geoff Trukenbrod, chief executive officer of Sedron. “Kinnard Farms is another facility producing it at commercial scale, and it came online on schedule. That is the start of a reliable domestic supply, not a pilot.”

The fertilizer is produced by a thermal process that has been validated by an independent process authority, and the product meets the criteria of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement for biological crop inputs that have gone through a validated treatment process. The validation is backed by testing: every lot is tested by an accredited independent laboratory for pathogens, including Salmonella and E. coli, against a non-detect standard, and a certificate of analysis accompanies each lot to the grower. The product is OMRI Listed and registered with the California Department of Food and Agriculture as an Organic Input Material.

“A grower who buys this product knows which dairy it came from, what it was heated to and what the lab found in the lot they are applying,” said Lucas Reid, vice president of development at Sedron. “That is what traceable nitrogen means: a product held to the standards the produce industry sets, not ours, and traceable to the farm that produced it.”

The announcement follows the publication last week of Building Resilient, Low Carbon Fertilizer Infrastructure, a perspective from Ara Partners, a leading private equity investor in industrial decarbonization, which committed up to $500 million to Sedron in April. The piece describes nutrient recovery as an emerging infrastructure asset class, argues that growers and food brands increasingly want nitrogen that is traceable, lower in embedded carbon and domestically produced, and summarizes Sedron’s dairy model in six words: “dairy waste in, decarbonized organic fertilizer out.”

“Northeast Wisconsin is home to some of the most innovative businesses in the country, and I had the opportunity to see that innovation firsthand during my visit to Sedron Technologies,” said Congressman Wied. “Their technology helps lower fertilizer costs and improve water quality, delivering meaningful benefits to dairy farmers in our district and across the country. I am so impressed by their operation and grateful to their team for the important work they do to support our dairy industry and strengthen our domestic fertilizer supply.”