Rockhound sees new industry cropping up.

It looks like a solid chunk of granite bedrock, but easily crumbles apart in his fingers into fine grains of glacial sand.

John Slack believes the rich and diverse nutrients in carbonatite can be the kickstart to an emerging organic farming and agro-mineral fertilizer industry in Northern Ontario.

For the past four years, Slack has been working a small backhoe, mostly by himself, in a three-acre pit about 60 kilometres northwest of Sudbury, excavating calcium carbonate rock from a large volcanic pipe near Fox Lake.

Renting digging equipment, loaders and extra help as he needs it for his self-financed project, he screens the material into a fine, cocoa-brown loam that can be worked into nutrient-poor soils or used as a mineral additive in livestock feed.

"Initially, one of our biggest marketing challenges was convincing customers we were not selling them a load of sand," jokes Slack, 42, who has since become well-known in agricultural circles throughout Ontario, Quebec and the U.S. Midwest for his specially branded product, Spanish River Carbonatite.

Slack bills carbonatite as an all-in-one nutrient for crops, plants, turf and forage crops; one that is high in calcium, potassium and vermiculite.

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This year stands to be his best ever. He will truck away about 10,000 tonnes of carbonatite, easily doubling last year's output, at $50 per metric tonne (retail it sells for between $110 and $120 a tonne). The product is hauled to organic and conventional growers to fertilize their orchards, vineyards, berry crops, forage fields, trees, cash and specialty crops like ginseng across Ontario, Quebec, the U.S. Midwest and down the eastern seaboard.

Slack's deposit contains a veritable breadbasket of nutrients for growers and gardeners and it offers all the minerals needed in one shot.

"It's quite mineralogically diverse," says Slack of the rock's mineral content, which contains on average of about 65 per cent igneous calcite (calcium carbonate), 10 per cent apatite (rock phosphate) and some potassium-bearing species.

Certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute of Oregon, carbonatite has proved so popular among organic and conventional growers that he ships product directly to farmers in Vermont, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Iowa, Michigan, as well as Quebec, southern Ontario and to growers in the Sudbury area.

"There are not many agricultural communities in southern Ontario that do not know what Spanish River Carbonatite is," says Slack, who is president of Agricultural Mineral Prospectors (AMP), a family-run company he established three years ago with his father Malcolm, brother Peter and two other associates.

Both John and Malcolm are graduates of the Haileybury School of Mines. The son and father team have worked as prospectors, geologists, and mining engineers in Northern Ontario and at various mining camps across Canada.

While prospecting for limestone north-west of Sudbury near Cartier in the early 1990s, they stumbled upon a large, clean, uranium-free carbonatite deposit.

After working as organic farmers in the Caledon area for the past 15 years, the progression into organic fertilizers was only natural. Their office is the Caledon family home, but the material is entirely sourced from the Northern Ontario quarry situated about 25 kilometres down a twisty logging road off Highway 144 near Fox Lake Lodge where Slack makes his temporary northern headquarters.

Sitting on a volcanic complex, Slack's deposit is about two-and-half kilometres long by one kilometre wide, formed under the same kind of intense heat and pressure that produces the kimberlite indicators, which are host material for diamonds and garnets.

He estimates the quarry holds a known resource of about 36 million tonnes and hopes to embark soon upon an exploration program of deep diamond drilling and reverse circulation drilling on an estimated resource of more than one billion tonnes.

"There's more ore there than has ever been mined in the last 100 years in Sudbury," says his father, Malcolm, a former vice-president of mining for Noranda. "It's a new product in a relatively new industry." He calls organic farming the "fastest developing segment of agriculture worldwide."

Their sales pitch to growers and consumers is that carbonatite is a chemical-free alternative to modern fertilizer, with no additives, and is not harmful to the environment and actually feeds nutrient-poor soils.

With about 25,000 acres of test plots and ongoing soil audits across Ontario, including some in Sudbury, AMP has gained the endorsement of A & L Laboratories, one of the largest agricultural and environmental labs in the U.S.

With a diverse set of clients lined up and a good chunk of an emerging market, Slack is pushing government and business to get on side. Now he is looking for investors to build an organic industry and says he is in discussions with interested parties who are well known in the mining industry.

"The biggest problem in Northern Ontario is people don't recognize the size of this market," laments Slack.

While they have focussed their business entirely on developing and selling products to farmers, they see vast opportunities in selling to backyard gardeners, for upscale turf applications and as a feed additive for farm animals and even for human consumption as a health food supplement. There is also potential in land reclamation projects for spoiled mining lands.

Part of Slack's message is that organic farming is no longer a cottage industry practiced by granola-chewers, but is a mainstream practice widely accepted in Europe and many parts of the U.S.

With a global trend toward more stringent food safety, consumer and industry demands for more nutritious foods, and governments demanding greener, more environmentally-responsible agricultural practices, the market for chemical-free fertilizers is only going to get bigger.

Slack believes AMP and Northern Ontario are ideally positioned to take advantage of that. And with such a rich deposit, why not develop a spin-off industry in the North in organic farming?

His vision has attracted the attention of some government observers, including FedNor, with whom Slack has had ongoing discussions about the possibility of developing a Northern Ontario Organic Resource Centre, revolving around the North's potential in the agro-mineral and the organic fertilizer market.

"There is a potential here that could significantly enhance the economic well-being of Northern Ontario," says Slack.

Tight-lipped Terry Fortin, a FedNor initiatives officer in Sudbury, would only say, "We've taken an interest and are looking at the short- and long-term potential of it."

Fortin's agency is sponsoring AMP as an exhibitor at this fall's Royal Winter Fair in Toronto for the second consecutive year.

Mike Cosec, Sudbury's district geologist with the Ontario Geological Survey, says the chances of finding another such deposit, that is clean of impurities such as low-grade uranium-type minerals, are very slim.

Aside from Cargill's vast phosphate deposit near Kapuskasing (which is refined into fertilizer), Cosec knows of no other producers in the Sudbury basin for the simple reason these rocks are hard to find in volcanic necks, as are diamonds.

"It's an environmentally-friendly extraction," says Cosec who has visited the site several times. "The soil grows on it quite well."

As with other industrial minerals, Cosec says the success of AMP will depend upon creating their own markets and securing a distribution network through a steady supply of material for the store shelves.

"It's a new material to break in, but I think he's (Slack) on the right track."

"It probably will be a growing industry and a lot has to with marketing and going out and hustling and getting people to buy your product.

"You may have a million tonnes of the stuff, but if you don't have the right connections you can't move it."

Laurentian University's mining researchers have also put in a proposal to do a mineralogical analysis for carbonatite and have started to compile a long-term case history on some Sudbury area controlled test plots.

Slack estimates his company's growth potential over the next three years to be between 50,000 and 60,000 tonnes. In compiling their marketing strategy he believes that capturing 10 to 20 per cent of the North American calcium market "isn't unheard of."

Slack is planning an "aggressive" education campaign for their annual meeting at Fox Lake Lodge on Oct. 8. Experts with perspectives in bio-agricultural practices, aluminum toxicity, grass-fed beef, organic potato production and organic market are scheduled to speak.

www.rockpowder.com

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business