Why We Started Ideal Soil Solutions

People hear “Ideal Soil Solutions” and assume it’s brand new. It isn’t, not really. It’s a new name for something I’ve been doing for about 25 years.

For a quarter century, I owned a distributorship for Summit Gold, a manufacturer out of Illinois that makes soil amendment, foliar, and microbial products. We’ve been running those products on our own ground since the early 2000s, and I’ve been selling them just as long. In 2023, we sold that distributorship to Jorgensen Land & Cattle, and it’s been running under that umbrella ever since. Now we’re growing it, and giving it a name that actually says what it does.

Here’s the part I want people to understand before anything else: Ideal Soil Solutions is not a product line. It’s a philosophy.

The products matter: Summit Gold’s lineup, our soil testing technology, everything else in the toolbox, but none of that is what separates us. What separates us is that we lead with the principles of soil health first, and the tools second. Those principles don’t change whether you’re growing corn, wheat, soybeans, orchards, vineyards, turf, golf courses, rangeland, or hayland. Anything with a plant and a root follows the same rules. Once you understand that, the tools you use to get there are just tools. The philosophy is what defines us from everybody else.

That also means this is a consultative business, not a sales pitch. We’re not walking onto your operation trying to move product off a shelf. We want to get intimate with what you’re doing: your ground, your goals, your constraints, and use what we know, backed by real testing, to fit the right pieces to your system. Not the other way around.

If you take one thing from this: we’re not here to sell you something. We’re here to help you build a soil system that works for you, for as long as you’re farming it.