Vol. XIX No. 5
September /October 2025
Serving Soil, Mulch, Compost & Firewood Producers www.SoilandMulchProducerNews.com
NEWS
Attention Readers !
Are you looking for Products, Equipment or Services for your business? If so, check out these leading companies advertised inside:
Automatic Floor Systems Keith Manufacturing Co – pg 10 Bagging/Palletizing Equipment Amadas Industries – pg 16 Premier Tech – pg 8 Compost Turner Resource Machinery & Engineering – pg 15 Conveyors & Conveyor Parts Amadas Industries – pg 16 Equipment Sales GrinderTrader.com – pg 14 Grinders, Chippers & Screening Systems Amadas Industries – pg 16 HogZilla – pg 14 Vermeer Corporation – pg 11 Mulch Coloring Equipment/ Colorants AgriCoatings – pg 7 Amerimulch – pg 13 Britton Industries – pg 18 CMC – pg 17 Colorbiotics – pg 2 Faltech – pg 4 Milagro Rubber Inc – pg 9 T.H. Glennon Co – pg 20 Mulch Suppliers Lambert Peat – pg 14 Ohio Mulch – pg 6 Payload Weighing & Measuring Systems Walz Scale – pg 5 Soil Amendment Green Solutions LLC – pg 15 Trommel Brushes Power Brushes Inc – pg 14 Wear Parts ArmorHog – pg 14
Resource Recycling Inc. Promises ‘The Yard You’ve Been Waiting For’
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By P.J. Heller
icah Hollinger remembers his grandfather saying how he survived his first few years in business “on love and turnips.” “That’s kind of been our motto,” says Hollinger, chief executive officer of Resource Recycling Inc., in Lima, Ohio. “We can make it on love and turnips, if nothing else.” Love, in this case, is his dedication and passion for the mulch and soil business. Turnips symbolize basic sustenance or living on very little or just enough to get by. While that may have been true when Hollinger first got into the mulch business nearly two decades ago, today his company offers some two dozen different products – mulches, soils, compost, stones and sand, either in bulk or bags – and employs 61 people. Looking ahead, he says he’d like to be running four to six bagging lines – up from the two bagging production lines for private label and retail applications currently in use. He’d also like to double his bulk sales. “We’d like to get to 1 million cubic yards of mulch and 200,000 yards of compost,” he says. That’s not too bad for someone who started the business with only his wife, Melissa, and one other person. When asked about their business plans back then, he would tell people, “We just want to stay in business until the next year.”
Hollinger admits he knew nothing about the mulch, soil and compost business when he first started. “I didn’t know anything about it, not the first thing,” he says. “It was kind of trial and error mostly. I’ve probably made triple the amount of mistakes as most people in my industry, but we’ve learned from them and kept going.” In his first year in business, he had another company producing mulch for him on his property. He subsequently rented a facility in Chillicothe, Ohio, for bulk mulch and discovered it had a bagging line, so he began offering bagged mulch. As the business grew over the years, he purchased grinders, a coloring machine and other equipment. In 2019, he ordered his first bagging equipment. That purchase came just as the pandemic was beginning, and Hollinger said he “pretty much freaked out.” “Everything was shutting down,” he recalls. “Like, what are we going to do?” Luckily, several major companies contacted Hollinger asking if he could co‑package for them. The business grew steadily from there. Hollinger also started shipping products in his own Resource Mulch-branded bags to big box stores such as Menards and Rural King. His products can also be found in garden Continued on page 3