Everton Organics, an organic fertilizer company, took the Paul J. Holloway Innovation-to-Market Prize at the 2015 competition on May 5. The competition was held at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics on the University of New Hampshire campus in Durham.
Everton outlasted 59 other teams in the multi-tiered competition, including a mobile app company, an iced coffee company and a company that makes remote monitoring devices for wells. (See finalists)
The Everton team received a $10,000 cash prize, plus website consulting and legal services and a subscription to the Wall Street Journal.
Everton president Everton Parkinson '16, a community and environmental planning major in the UNH College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, says the idea for the company sprang from a lecture in his freshman year. It was in a natural resources class; they were talking about Cuba. When the Soviet Union fell and the Cuban embargo persisted, Cubans could no longer import fertilizer. “They started making compost as a nation, and they processed it using worms,” Everton said during the final round of the Holloway competition.
Everton Organics uses renewable ingredients sourced from three certified organic sites in New Hampshire and Vermont to create its product — a chemical-free fertilizer for organic producers and home gardeners. Other Everton team members include A.J. Asbury '16, a political science major in the UNH College of Liberal Arts; Ian Marshall '15, who graduated May 16 with a degree in mechanical engineering from the UNH College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, and Sean Whittier '16, a business analytics major at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics.
The Holloway competition was created to spur entrepreneurship among undergraduate and graduate students at the University of New Hampshire, Keene State College, Plymouth State University and Granite State College. It is the oldest competition of its kind in New Hampshire and was one of the first in the nation.
Taking second place in the competition was MediaBite, a company providing a conduit for pay-per-article media consumption for end users of digital written media.
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Written By:
Tracey Bentley | Communications and Public Affairs
