Steve Gruhn
Steve Gruhn grew up on a family farm in Spirit Lake, Iowa. Growing up he always thought
he wanted to be able to make enough money to move someplace where the wind didn't blow
so darn much. He got into the Greenhouse
business during the farm crisis of the 80's, when it turned out to be more profitable
to sell sod than corn. After this experience, he realized he'd never make enough money
farming to get away from the wind, so he figured he better find some use for it. When
Spirit Lake Schools
installed one of the nation's first school wind turbines in 1993, the dream started
to take shape. Iowa has a very impressive wind energy resource, but what was going
to be the best use of wind energy for farms? It won't help much drying corn, as that
is quite variable. Electric tractors charged from wind energy would weight too much.
Then fertilizer prices started going up, because of natural gas prices. That was it.
Freedom Fertilizer was born.
Troy Benjegerdes
Troy Benjegerdes grew up on the Benjegerdes family farm in Manly, rewiring several
of the bins, and attempting to build motor controllers from catalog parts. He had
helped harvest, and once hauled ammonia tanks from the co-op to the farm for application,
and after a close call pulling the tank, decided he never wanted to deal with ammonia again.
In 1993,
the
Sunrayce 93 solar car race
came up highway 65, 2 miles west of the farm, and Troy watched the
PrISUm II solar
car go up the road at 20mph, and found a calling. He enrolled in Iowa State University
in 1994, and started on an electrical engineering degree, and worked on the Cynergy
and ExCYtor solar cars. He also found during this time that it's not the design, or
the idea, or flashy things that make a system like a solar car work. It's the little
details and how all the little parts fit together. So the guy with the electrical
engineering degree was working on the solar car brakes. Because that was the weak
link in the chain. After getting sunburned out on the solar car, Troy finished his
degree with more a computer software/hardware integration focus, and then worked
for two software start-ups. In 2003 he joint the Ames Laboratory
Scalable Computing Lab as a Linux system adminstrator. While in that position,
Troy developed
concept software to allow
computer systems to adjust their power consumption based on renewable energy
availability. However, computers run based on human demand, so applying this
concept to computers is a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. In mid 2009,
Troy ended up coming across the wind energy to ammonia concept, and immediately
realized that
Ammonia production was a perfect process for adjusting the
rate of production to match wind energy, and after a few conversations with Steve
and Mark Rosenbury, all of a sudden was thrust into the middle of a start-up company
intending to make the very thing he once said he'd stay away from.