An underwhelming mining discovery has fueled a lifelong agricultural career for Russell Taylor, who’s helped his family build a successful business from a failed energy exploration venture.

Four decades ago, Taylor’s father came up empty while searching for fossil fuels in the Utah desert. Instead, he developed a mining claim that yielded a different type of bounty: Humate deposits.

“We’re basically mining an ancient forest floor,” Taylor said.

Humate is essentially “really old compost,” in which the organic matter has stabilized after being decomposed by microbes, he said. For farmers, spreading humate delays nitrogen and other nutrients from leaching from the soil or volatilizing into gases.

“We’re stretching out that application and giving the plant a longer opportunity to use that nutrient,” Taylor said.

Taylor is now the vice president of Live Earth Products and a crop adviser who helps farmers understand how to use the family company’s humate products. He’s learned the business from the ground up, working at his father’s side since childhood.

“He’d go out and drill the holes and I’d get the dynamite ready,” Taylor said.

With the agriculture industry’s growing interest in sustainable and regenerative methods, the company’s investment in natural farm inputs has paid off since the family began extracting humate deposits in the 1980s, he said.

“We just didn’t know we were cool back then,” Taylor said.

Though the company’s humate products are certified as organic, its typical customers are conventional farmers who want to maximize the value of synthetic fertilizers, Taylor said. As a general rule, growers apply one part of humic acid — a primary component of humate — per 10 parts of urea ammonium nitrate or another nitrogen fertilizer.

“The bulk of our sales are to that audience,” he said.

Agriculture represents roughly half of the market for the company’s products, which are also used in the turf, animal feed and cosmetics industries. For example, fulvic acid — another component of humate — aids in the absorption of cosmetic creams.

“We sell internationally, so our minerals are used all over the world,” Taylor said.

To better serve the farmers who buy from Live Earth Products, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural business, a subject encompassing everything from accounting to soil biology, he said. More recently, he also obtained a Master of Business Administration, or MBA.

In 2023, Taylor was named the Certified Crop Advisor Conservationist of the Year, an award administered by the American Society of Agronomy.

“You’ve got to show up to help that farmer grow a crop and do it economically,” Taylor said.

Beyond advancing the interests of his family’s company, Taylor has worked to improve the standing of the humate industry as a whole. To that end, he helped establish a trade association that advocates for regulations to strengthen the industry.

Taylor has led the Humic Products Trade Association as president for more than a decade, pushing for uniform testing for the active ingredients and adulterants contained in humate products.

Depending on the testing method, for instance, the concentration of humic acid in a liquid solution can vary from 6% to 12%, even though it’s the same product, he said.

Such disparities and inaccuracies made it tough for farmers to compare products and know exactly what they’d paid for, prompting the industry to develop protocols recognized by the International Standardization Organization.

“The primary goal of the trade association was to get everyone on the same method, the same standard,” Taylor said. “That was a lot of work, for the trade association to develop those tests and get them accepted by ISO.”

These days, the association is trying to clarify how the federal government regulates humic extracts that serve as “biostimulants,” which can fall under the purview of pesticide law under certain circumstances, he said. The ultimate goal is legitimizing such products by ensuring correct labeling and reducing the potential for chicanery.

“It’s all consumer protection,” Taylor said. “It’s about improving the industry we’re working in. For us to innovate, we have to change the sand box we’re playing in.”

Greater regulatory precision will especially be necessary as the industry learns to refine the thousands of different organic acids contained in humate and understands their specific uses, he said.

“Going forward, we’re going to learn more about mode of action — how the products actually work,” Taylor said.