Acadian Plant Health™ started as a seaweed company, harvesting a type of seaweed known by its scientific name Ascophyllum nodosum. We harvest it from the North Atlantic, extract its active ingredient for use in our biostimulant products, and provide it to a variety of industry partners who use it in their crop protection and fertilizer products they provide to their grower customers.
We’ve become an authority on biostimulants and have proven that this category of crop protection product is not snake oil, but an effective tool to help growers prosper even when faced by the challenges of climate change and more.
But it wasn’t always this way. We’ve had to work hard to find the recipe for success that helps take a company from its humble beginnings to global success. Here’s what we did.
We put the focus on end-user efficacy and benefits. Our founder, Louis Deveau, had for years seen seaweed from the coasts of Nova Scotia used in farming. It was used either raw or lightly processed and placed with the seeds right into the ground. This was the genesis of going from a seaweed company to a manufacturer of a proprietary product shipped globally.
We did the research. It required a lot of work to unlock the mode of action present in Ascophyllum nodosum and convert it from raw material to liquid. That took about 20 years of development and formed the basis of Acadian Plant Health 1.0. Now, Acadian Plant Health 2.0 is taking the form of a global company looking for opportunities to sell in the market outside North America.
We knew the realities of the market and didn’t shy away from them. We were fully aware that growers have suspicions of biological products. We’ve proven our products’ efficacy time and again via successful demonstration trials. After using our products over the past 40 years, growers know they can depend on their performance.
We knew where the gap was. When you have a wonderful product, how do you get that into the hands of growers around the world so they can realize the benefits of it? Many growers won’t have the option of using synthetic chemistry anymore, or not as much of it. Take the Green Deal in Europe, for example. That was a gap we knew needed filling, and we could be the ones to fill it.
Our 40-year journey has led us to changing the biostimulant game. We have significant access to raw materials, secure sourcing, and we’re experts at converting raw material to a consistent liquid seaweed product line. As a result, we’ve become one of the most sophisticated players in the biostimulant space that looks for strategic partners to bring our innovations to growers.
