Interview with the Evanston Valley Enterprises Founders (part 1)

Q: Give me the history of Evanston Valley Enterprises?

Matt Knepper: Evanston Valley Enterprises started when we had an ice storm here in Southern Indiana. When we got our start with K&K Tree Division, what really put us on the map and got us busy was the ice storm in the winter of 2008-09.  We had a small chipper, and we produced mountains of wood chips.

We had two different properties across the road from each other where we piled the wood chips.  One wood chip pile we were able to move and essentially sell; we just got rid of it.  On the other side of the road, we had all our firewood and debris; and as you drove down the road, you could see it.  We took the wood chips, and we built a giant privacy fence all the way along the edge of the property in kind of an L shape. And it was eight or ten feet tall.  I mean, it was just a big berm of wood chips.  And it sat there for years as we were working out of that facility,

Around 2012, we moved from mom and dad's area over to the farm property at 1000 North.  As we were getting things moved over to the new property, we wanted to clean out that wood scrap area, because we had a new area for it at the new location.  We needed to get all the material moved over and cleaned up, so it looked nice in front of mom and dad's house. On the outside of the pile, it still looked like a pile of woodchips. But we had a backhoe, and our single axle dump truck, and I went over to start moving the material.  I scooped the first bucket load, and there weren’t any woodchips underneath there. I mean, it was just black.  It caught me off guard, so I got out of the backhoe, and I went over and dug in there by hand. When I pulled out a handful, it just had a real earthy, dirt smell.  And I kept digging deeper and deeper, and there was not a wood chip to be found!

I had no idea where the wood chips had gone. So, we started doing some research. We got online and started looking things up and found that organic matter decomposes over time; it's a natural process. As we moved all that material, and it was just the blackest, richest looking soil, and we thought, K&K Dirt Works, we always have requests for topsoil.  Maybe this is a way that we can get rid of one product from the tree service and make a product for the Dirt Works side to sell.  We never thought it would take off.  We started researching how to produce compost; how did all that work; and can we replicate it?  And how can we make it decompose faster?  

So, we moved everything over to the new location, and it was a very large pile of compost.  That ultimately is how we got started, and we sold every bit of that material.  Then in 2014, we decided we would begin making compost, and that's when we incorporated Evanston Valley Enterprises.  And it's just grown from there.