This is the time of year when America's on the move.

We travel.

It's the start of the tourist season.

We move to see people, to visit places, to take that great American vacation.

And that means flying, means travel.

Could be that all-American road trip.

And that's what we decided to do this week on In Business.

I'm Ken Buer.

Thank you for joining us.

Our road trip is taking us to Pine River.

We're going to tour a couple of companies.

One that makes a very unique inf flooror heating device.

Another one that makes a skid steer add-on that splits and cuts firewood.

And then we're going down the road a piece to Aken where we'll visit a Pete farm harvesting operation.

Yeah, it's all in business.

It's all the great American road trip.

Or as Dan Akroyd said, playing Eldridge Blues in the Blues Brothers movie to Pine River.

It's 106 miles.

We've got a full tank of gas, a half a pack of cigarettes, and we're wearing sunglasses.

Hit it.

This is in business.

Welcome to In Business.

I'm Ken Builder.

This week, we're hitting the road to discover some of the innovative products being made across our region.

We began at a company that has designed a product to make cutting firewood safer, faster, and easier.

This was the first schematics of my first button harness that we're still doing today in a different version of course, but we're still using that same principle that I use.

My grandson's Tristan, he was 3 years old at the time.

And we drew that because he had a color crayons that had several different colors to it.

And that's what they we built off.

Now we have schematics and stuff that professionally drawn, but it's not very professional, but it may it we got it going anyhow.

So we're still using that same system today.

This is in business and we're on a road trip.

Glenn Halverson, we're in the final assembly area of Halverson Wood Products where you make the wood processing unit.

Um, but I'm interested in how this all got started.

You were in farming.

Well, I grew up on a farm, dairy farm, and I I'm a log hauler by trade back in ' 07.

I sold my trucks and equipment and went to work for Knife River as a road mechanic.

And then I got laid off in the winter time.

So, I'd tinker in the winter time.

I made several different things and some of them I scrapped, some of them I still have today.

So, so you started just tinkering and coming up with products based on what?

What did you what what was the inspiration?

I think I'm cheap and I like to build it rather than buy it.

And it's I took a fun in building it myself and I saved all this money, but I just didn't figure out my hours.

And you said that uh a lot of the inspiration came from walking through junkyards.

Yeah, I uh Dutch Crowing County back in the day.

I'd walk through there and just see things out of the junk.

And I I made tillers, concrete mixers that weighed things.

I made loader swings.

I made uh did like a dozen things over the years that And still we're still dreaming up stuff today.

You know, we have an R&D department that we're still building, diversifying.

And the wood processor, the firewood processor, what was the inspiration behind that?

How did you think that up?

I had made years ago, I'd made a inverted splitter.

It's an upside down splitter for for uh a skid steer.

And I one day I flipped her upside down to split some wood like a normal splitter would.

And I thought, boy, it'd be nice to put a saw in this.

And that took me quite a while.

But yeah, we got her figured out.

You tell me these things are sold all over the world.

Yeah, we have we have we have a dealer in Japan, I believe.

Uh New Zealand, Australia, uh Czech Republic.

Uh there's countries that I don't even probably can't pronounce, but I have salesmen that do that for me.

So I kind of my background of course I step back from that.

So we're in the final assembly area for Hverson Wood Products here in Pine River.

Uh Hannah Kahi is the superintendent for the shop and her job is to make sure that what we saw at the paint booth turns into a finished product.

How does that happen here?

So, we get our bare frames up from the paint booth and then my guys, they'll take the bare frames, then they'll put all the components into them, your saw, your bars, your valve body, your hoses, all that stuff.

And then after they get that done, it goes off to QC and it gets QCed.

Make sure everything's all good and then sent off.

So, this is our 120 trailer model.

Uh, you got your table here that moves back and forth and it'll cut and it'll split your wood.

You obviously got your bar here, your grab arm, and then this one has diverters in it and a valve body.

That's all your hoses.

This one is also a stationary unit, so you don't have a skid steer.

You don't need a skid steer to run it.

You got your motor there to run everything.

And then you just got your buttons to go off of that.

So, the concept here is a machine that not only cuts the wood to a size, but then also splits it for firewood.

Correct.

So, how does that work?

This machine ain't totally done yet, but there's buttons here, six buttons, then you can just run it off your fingers.

You take your saw, you hit a button, it'll bring down, cut your wood, and it'll fall into your hopper.

And after that, you can run your table forward and it'll split it for you.

So this is our 150 model.

This is our skid steer model.

So you come around, you can take your skid steer and you can hook it right up to here.

Then you just go from there.

You pick up your logs.

You can cut and split the same way as that 120 trailer.

How do you load uh the wood?

Somebody's got to do that or how does that work?

So this machine ain't totally done, but there's legs that come out.

There's another chunk that comes out.

And then when you're in your skid steer, you dump it down and you pick your log up and you roll it back.

And then you take a grab worm, clamp it down, it'll hold it there for you to cut the log.

How many of these uh do you turn out in a in a day or a week or a month?

Do you have a goal?

Um Curtis and Rory, they can pump out for a week.

I'd say seven, eight of them.

Innovation doesn't stop there.

Our next stop takes us to a company working to make homes more resilient.

We visited a business developing an in flooror heating system designed to support resilient living.

This stop on our in business road trip this week finds us in Pine River.

Now that's about a half hour north of Brainer Baxter and we're at the Hunt Utilities Group campus in Pine River.

And Ryan Hunt is with us.

He is the president of HUG.

They make the hug hydronic heating system and a bunch of other products and other very useful things we're going to talk about this week on In Business.

Tell me a little bit about the history of this company.

You bet.

We've been here for a couple of decades.

We sit on about a 60 acre research campus.

We call it a resilient living research campus and we've been studying all sorts of different solutions to uh sustainable living.

Essentially, we have uh explored things like high performance buildings, super insulated, oriented to capture the sun, pretty much heating themselves.

Uh we've done water reprocessing in a house.

Back to potable.

We've done uh a little stint in cold fusion even and other battery research.

This all ties together on sustainable living and that's kind of what the campus is.

I saw a couple of wind generators when I came in.

There's a solar array, so you're actually living what you uh produce.

We're definitely trying.

Yes.

And how does that make you feel?

I love the resilient living uh approaches.

It's a unique concept uh but one that's becoming much more popular.

There are so many real threats to human uh sustainability.

you know, our position on the planet, our comfortable living.

And we really need to focus on solutions uh instead of diversion and uh denial.

The all the solutions we need are out there.

They can be developed.

Uh we just need the political will to push that direction.

So from sustainability, how did you get into then the inf flooror heating part of this business?

We've made lots of homes that uh heat and cool themselves mostly from the sun and are super efficient.

But in every home, we wanted in floor heat because it's the most comfortable and we thought there must be a better way to do it.

So the better way to do it is first of all you have the uh tubing in the floor as you're building it.

It's part of the construction of the property.

Correct.

And then you've got a boiler to heat what goes through those tubes.

Correct.

And then what do you got?

Instead of that wall full of plumbing you normally see in a in flooror heat system in a house, we've taken and gotten rid of all the valves and fittings and manifolds and instead we do the same job with a box of water and a handful of pumps.

And how does that work?

Let me show you.

Inside here there is a series of pumps.

This would be full of water.

The pump in the corner sends the water up to a heating system, a boiler up above it on the wall.

Then that hot water comes back in, mixes with everything else, and these pumps connect directly to loops in the floor that come up behind the unit.

This rubber hose comes straight from the pump to the pecs in the floor.

Just pushes over, squeeze the clamp on it, and that's that's it.

That's all that the plumbing there is.

Now what are the advantages of this as uh from an environmental standpoint from a economic standpoint?

What are the advantages other than the space saving?

Main advantage is it's simple enough that you can put it in yourself or you can your contract your general contractor can put it in and avoid using the uh expensive plumbing labor.

So you can it the installed package is a lot less money.

Also it's very serviceable.

These pumps can pop right off the hose and pop back be replaced and pop back on in just a couple of minutes by hand with no tools.

So service, you can avoid service calls down the road.

This is a unique device.

How long has it been on the market and how many are there out there?

We started this uh really pushing this around 2000.

We had to deal with uh the pandemic issues.

Um, but since then, uh, we've been slowly gaining momentum and now we ship them all over the country.

They are uniquely simple to install.

So, they're easy for us to support wherever they go in the country.

We can train a new contractor how to install it in about an hour.

Our magic is this box, but we quickly learned that to help our customers make this happen, we could make it a lot easier if we provided them the next piece and the next piece and the next piece.

So now we sell the tubing tubing that goes in the floor.

We sell the foam insulation that the tubing rides right into.

We sell the different options for boilers on the wall and uh all the tools and uh a pressure test kit and a number of other little accessories.

So that boiler is crucial.

Uh and you can use any energy to to power that.

Right.

That's right.

uh whatever kind of boiler we want.

We can fuel it with natural gas, propane, uh electric, we can even use if you have a solar hot water setup, we can make that work.

Uh a uh heat pump system.

Heat pumps are very efficient.

They multiply the energy you put into it.

And uh air to water heat pumps are really an up and cominging trend for us.

The control board was designed here uh with our team and it takes the thermostat inputs and turns on the correct pumps to feed the that part of the house.

And who invented all this?

What's the uh the genius behind the hug system?

So I'm president of the company and my father is the wizard of the company.

He uh the he's the electronic design genius who uh developed this, but he's got a team of engineers also working with him to to do the layout and order the boards.

And he's he's just the not Jos, but he's the he's the wizard.

Yes.

Okay.

And president of the company.

Um and it's been around how long?

Uh we've been here since 2001 and practicing all these different things.

Before our next segment, here's a quick look at some business news from across the region.

Minnesota's hemp derived THC industry has received a temporary reprieve.

The US Senate has delayed a federal ban on certain hemp derived THC products until December, thereby giving producers more time as lawmakers work toward a long-term solution.

In Superior, a new survey shows many small businesses expect to feel the impact of the upcoming Blotnik Bridge closure.

The survey found many businesses anticipate slower revenue during the construction period while local organizations continue to push for financial assistance and other support.

And finally, Frasier Shipyards in Superior has announced a partnership with HD Hyundai to modernize its facility.

The agreement will bring new technology, automation, and modern ship building practices to the shipyard with the goal of helping revitalize ship building on the Great Lakes.

Our final stop on this week's road trip features a product you may have seen without even realizing it.

One of its many uses is at Target Field and is another example of the unique products being created here in our region.

Let's take a look.

You can see the structure here, Ken.

See the see the layering uh kind of crudely developed like this.

That's actually the different layers of Pete that accumulated.

And you see how it's fibrous it is.

That's the actual root structure of the grass that was, you know, from 8,000 years old.

Uh is what this is.

And is there a lot of it?

Oh, yeah.

We've got a lot of Pete.

We're not sure.

We figure we have about a 250 year supply ahead of this plant.

Our in business road trip has taken us to the bog.

And here we meet Peggy Jones.

She is vice president of research and development for American Pete Technologies.

And this is where it all begins.

This is the bog.

This is the raw material.

This is where it begins.

said, "I know nothing about Pete other than it played a role in Weathering Heights because that's where they buried Catherine and Heathcliffe and all that, but what is Pete?"

So, Pete is partially decomposed plant matter.

So, think about when you a plant grows, okay, in the winter time it dies.

In this climate, when it dies, if it's in a wetland like um in a in a shallow lake, uh it falls beneath the water surface, right?

That's an anoxic, a very oxygen poor environment.

So, that plant doesn't fully decompose.

Okay, so now fast forward to the next spring, new vegetation is coming up.

It's literally growing up through the the bones of last year's plants.

Right now imagine that happening over a millennia.

And so o eventually over time you get these large accumulations of partially decomposed plant matter and that's Pete.

Now in some countries uh it was used and dried as fuel.

Correct.

That's correct.

And it's still in some places used in Europe it for fuel when some when other fuel sources become questionable or short supply but it's not used for fuel very often.

You're using it here in your process for a myriad of products.

Obviously not fuel.

Correct.

What is probably one of the growth areas that you see?

Uh Pete is a great soil amendment.

And so I think what we're going to see over time is that we're going to take all of our knowledge about granulating Pete and translate it into the turf in the horiculture market.

So eventually someday we hope that you'll see some of our value added products in a big box retailer for instance for growing patio plants or tomatoes or you know the home garden.

Um you know and so and then I think beyond that there's lots of other advancements to be had in agriculture water treatment some of our other areas.

In business continues our look into the American Pete Technologies company located just outside of Aken on our road trip week for In Business and uh Doug Green is with us.

Doug is one of the founders of American Pete Technology and his founding of it goes back to his earlier career.

You were a gold miner in Alaska, right?

Yeah.

19 years in that business and and uh got out of it about 1997 something like a lot of work not necessarily a lot of gold but we are mining still.

Explain what happens here at American Pete Technologies.

So So we harvest Pete out of the bog about a mile west of here during the winter months.

We um we go out with a cat and back hole and side dump trucks and we load out the entire pete section from the base of the deposit all the way to the top.

We um intentionally freeze a lot of the surface of the bog and the roads and uh so we uh haul on those frozen roads and we develop a stockpile here and we try to keep as much frost in that stockpile as we possibly can, actively freezing it back all winter long.

And then from there it goes into the plant in its process, right?

It comes into the plant frozen and you'll see we have probably the biggest water heaters in northern Minnesota here and we warm we salvage heat that is normally going up our stack the discharge from the dryers.

We take that low temperature air and pull the heat out of that and bring it back into the process to thaw the pete.

So, we've got an active uh thawing uh process made of reclaimed heat, if you will.

And then once the pete is thawed, it's still dirt.

What what what do you do to it then to make the products that we were looking at?

Well, there's several steps we have to take it through.

We we create a slurry.

We're going to dry Pete out.

So, the first thing we do is add water, right?

uh and we create a slurry and we screen the sticks and the stumps and rocks and scrap iron and all the things you can imagine that have been spread through that bog for the years.

They all have to come out.

And so this uh screening step is really important.

And then then we take that material and dewater it.

And now we're back to something that looks very much like the parent pete.

And then we take that through the process.

And depending on what kind of a granle we make, we'll dry it or pelletize it or we will roll it into a round ball.

It depends on what the customer wants in their product that particular day.

And you make a myriad of different products, right?

They have different purposes uh to accommodate different types of machinery, you know, so that it flows well through uh the seating equipment.

And uh that's actually a really important important feature to the product.

The roadtrip version of in business this week is about Pete and uh a kind of mining that uh Brad Piper knows a lot about.

He is the CEO of American Pete Technologies and we're at their home office just outside of Akin Minnesota.

Brad, thank you for joining in business.

Well, I appreciate you coming out to visit us at the bog.

Tell us a little bit about what the bog is producing here at this plant.

Yeah.

So, where you're standing is one of the richest reed sedge pete bogs in in all the world.

And so, here we uh take from prior converted petlands.

Those are petlands that have been drained and dredged by farmers hundreds of years ago um that are now no longer live bogs.

We uh harvest Pete about 2 and a half acres a year uh on average and we granulate them for products that help the a industry and really provide a biological alternative to what otherwise would be chemical practices for growers.

So a more natural way to farm or to do other things like water purification.

That's exactly right.

So, uh, you know, the four areas that we work in are aronomy, that would be, uh, row crops and turf.

It would be water treatment.

Uh, we're starting to work in the in the electrification of our country and battery mineral processing.

And we also make a whiskey that you'll see right over here over my shoulder.

Well, let's uh tell us about some of these products.

Which was one of the first ones that you developed?

Yeah, so uh, American Pete started as a request from an industry.

So pulse crops, particularly pulse crops that are grown in the Canadian prairie provinces, need reed sedge pete because they use natural nitrogen fixation from riseobia bacteria.

And that riseobia bacteria likes to live on Pete.

And so our our first product was this bioapp crumble product.

And this comes straight from the bog.

It gets uh granulated down to low low moisture.

And then we send this off to customers who then put riseobia bacteria on it themselves, bag it into uh smaller packing sizes and ship it out to growers who use it at the time of planting infurrow with their seeds.

So this would be a product that would go into the ground with the seed and then help it grow and mature.

That's exactly right.

So, so the riseobia bacteria will fix nitrogen in the seed and you'll know you've uh done the right thing when you see nodulation uh in those soybeans or those peas or those lentils.

Beyond row crops, we've started to look at other types of plants and one of the natural extensions of what we were doing was in the turf business.

And so, uh we helped plant a golf course here in the Brainer Lakes area.

And from that experience, we realized what we were doing was really helping the soil.

And so if you have a healthy soil, you have a healthy plant.

And so quickly we started to develop products, all natural from the bog with other micronutrients such as biochar um to uh help grow grass.

And we presented that with our partners from Twin Cities Seed.

We created uh a divot mix that now sits on a lot of the country clubs here in the Twin Cities.

So when I take a duffer shot, this is what I'm putting on the ground.

This is what you're putting on the ground.

And the grass is growing back faster and stronger and it becomes more playable more quickly.

You know, the Twins are now running around on this at Target Field.

When Byron Buckston takes a divot out of center field, this is what goes back on the on the field and why it looks so good.

Justin Jefferson when he's cutting at the Vikings practice facility and he tears up the grass.

This is what's going down to grow that back up.

So now, what do you see as the future?

We were talking about the electrification of America.

How does Pete play a role in that?

Yeah.

So, you know, we are geologists, we are chemists, we understand the topography of the of the area that we live in.

And so, one of the things that we are rich in is is ferromaganese ore.

Back in World War II, ferro ore was a trash metal because when you had a lot of manganesees in your ore, you'd throw it aside.

Well, that manganesees has become valuable because manganesees is the largest proportion of an NMC uh electric battery uh chemistry.

And so, um you know, because of manganesees, you don't see batteries blowing up like they used to when they first when they first came.

It's the stabilizing metal.

And so we have used our ion exchange technology to be able to extract manganesees from ferro manganesees ore um and take that manganesees that gets extracted and purify it to a point where it's ready to be used in batteries.

And so our goal in the not too distant future is to be one of a few uh first ever processors of critical min minerals in uh in the state of Minnesota in the United States of America to support industries like energy and like defense.

Um because right now 99.8% 8% of all minerals are processed in China.

Brad Piper is the CEO of American Pete Technologies here just outside of Aken where we're talking about a worldwide impact from this plant.

That's got to be exciting.

I I've never had more fun uh in my in my career and that we're just getting started.

We say we're 23 years into a 100redyear journey and we have 77 years to make a difference.

You know, we we look at another company that innovated from the earth like us 120 years ago and a lot of people watched the golf tournament that it recently sponsored.

So, we look at our friends at 3M as something that we aspire to be and um why not us?

We we understand um what's valuable in the earth.

We know what's been being overlooked by others and we want to bring natural products to market just like 3M did over a century ago.

Brad, thank you very much for being on In Business.

Yeah, thank you.

I'm Ken Ber.

Thanks for watching In Business.

If you missed any parts of tonight's show, you can always watch it at pbsnorth.org or listen on Mondays at 5:30 on the North 1033.

Thanks again for watching and until next time, let's take care of each other.