At AmHydro, they like to call AmHydro founder Michael Christian a “hydroponic wizard”. His thirty-year passion and unprecedented experience in growing and developing new technologies is why American Hydroponics is the industry leader in productivity and service. He is the driving force that started AmHydro over thirty years ago in 1984.
AmHydro is excited to present the first of a four-part interview series with AmHydro President, Jenny Harris, interviewing Michael about the journey: how he got started, how technologies evolved, and what he sees for hydroponics in the future.
Jenny: Sun Circle, Inc. (AmHydro’s parent company) has been around for over 30 years, how has it evolved in that time and what got you excited about it initially back in the 1980’s?
Michael: Like most businesses it started with an entrepreneurial seizure – a great idea, full of possibilities and not a clue how to build a business out of it. We targeted the grow lamp market. Grow lamps were a big deal back in the early 80’s. But to me it was obvious by watching how plants grew under them, by competing and shading one another, that the lamps needed to move…like the sun. The idea of the “Sun” Circle 360 degree lamp rotator was obvious. Slowly rotating lamps increased the angles of light incidence to leaf surfaces and by blending Metal Halide and High Pressure Sodium spectrums were were more efficiently turning watts into plan growth. But how could we quantify this? By setting up a control with scientific measurements. To accomplish this we setup our first rudimentary hydroponic system using bus tubes. We teased up the information we were after on lighting efficiency and fell in love with the hydroponic growing system in the process. We immediately started improving on that as well. Discovery and implementation of an idea is what always kept us excited. AmHydro has continuously evolved through this process.
Jenny: In these 30 years, were there any ‘Aha!’ moments that took your breath away or caused you to change the way you were currently doing things?
Michael: Usually the ‘Aha’ moments followed mistakes or spells or shortsighted thinking from not having a clue. It was usually, ‘Aha…well we won’t do it that way again’. Inventing something out of nothing is humbling. It is easy to go belly up by not recognizing the art of ‘building capacity’. We found that life is indifferent to our concerns, it didn’t care. We had manufacturing, tooling, and materials down but learned that we needed to build competence in the domains of bookkeeping, computers, marketing, sales, strategic planning, building vendor relationships….and so on. When you’re small, you can’t hire people to take care of all of these domains and if you did, how would you know if they were doing a good job? The reality is all that happens in a business is that we have conversations, build and maintain relationships, make and fulfill orders, and move objects around. We didn’t understand the notion of ‘loaded labor’ and the effect it had on our margin. We wondered why we were selling tons of product and suffering a negative cash flow. The ‘Aha’ moment was when we realized we were paying people to buy our products. Hard lessons like that are unavoidable. To survive and prosper in business…you keep diving off the diving board and inventing water.
Jenny: AmHydro developed a hydroponic system within our industry that has earned a reputation for being the most reliable – both in productivity and durability. When you first got started, how did you stumble upon this design and how has it changed?
Michael: After seeing for ourselves how the Australians are using NFT hydroponics, we knew we had to do something similar in the US market. It just didn’t exist at that time. So…we changed our focus from hobby products to commercial products and bought a container of channels from Australia to carry out some research and development. We put the system together locally and started growing. There is no way we would sell a system we didn’t understand completely ourselves – so we climbed the steep learning curve of competence in NFT growing. We made tones of mistakes, the very same mistakes our growers would have made if we hadn’t made them first ourselves. We sold produce at the local farmer’s markets to see exactly what growers would run into. It took two years to get to a place where we could confidently sell a system and KNOW we could guide the grower to success. In this process of designing and redesigning layouts, experimenting with materials, simplifying the feeder and return plumbing, simplifying the table frames around ease of assembly and increased strength while always remaining mindful of shipping. Shipping was brutal on everything – the whole system had to land at the grower’s site and be self-evident how it all went together. In that process, we stumbled over every obstacle imaginable. Growers gave us feedback about what they liked and what they didn’t like…we listened to everything they had to say and increased what they like and fixed what they didn’t like. There was no way of knowing going into a new product what we going to be required to improve that system until we got there – then that necessary improvement became a focus until it was rectified. The system(s) we have today are the results of years and years of experimentation and feedback that stands on the shoulders of innumerable vendors, customers, engineers, friends, and associates.
Jenny: AmHydro now creates systems for commercial growers that ships domestically and internationally – is the company where you envisioned it would be?
Michael: The company is right where I thought it was possible to be 20 years ago…it just took longer than I planned! I started this venture at 36 and now I’m 66. It’s been quite a ride – I can’t say that I’ve loved every minute of it, but the overall satisfaction of providing the tools for localizing food production worldwide has made it all worth it.
Stay tuned next month as we continue this interview series and delve more deeply into the intricacies of AmHydro’s evolution throughout the years.
If you have any questions for Jenny to ask Michael post them here.
This article was published on AmHydro's corporate blog.
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