Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, June 8th.

Today on Forbes, how an unassuming geologist cracked the global fertilizer cartel.

The eureka moment came in 2012 when Professor Emeritus William Harrison of the University of Western

Michigan invited Ted Pagano, then a 35-year-old freelance geologist,

to his 27,000-square-foot geological repository in Kalamazoo.

A rock nerds heaven, the warehouse's heavy-duty shelves, feature crates of minerals from across the state.

But Pagano was there to see something specific.

The 80 pallets of rock cores donated in 2008 by the Mosaic Company, a large New York Stock

Exchange listed potash specialist. Cors are standardized cylinders of rock, three feet long

and four inches in diameter. These were recovered from some 75 wells drilled back in the early 1980s

to depths 8,000 feet beneath Osceola and Macasta counties,

a sparsely populated swath of central Michigan,

into a layer of rock, rich in minerals deposited by an ocean that evaporated millions of years ago. Those minerals include

salt, or sodium chloride, and potash, or mostly potassium oxide, which farmers prize as a fertilizer.

It's a critical mineral. The U.S. uses 5.3 million tons annually and imports 95% of it, mostly from Canada.

Pagano was excited to see these cores because he had hoped they would prove his hunch,

that Mosaic had been sitting on a potash mother load in Michigan far bigger than anyone realized.

He suspected that the deposit, if properly developed, could provide one million tons of

fertilizer per year for American farmers. That would be nearly seven times the volume that Mosaic's little

150,000 ton per year plant in Hersey, Michigan, was producing. Putting up $70,000 of his own money,

Pagano had formed Michigan, potash, and salt company,

and was already leasing up mineral rights from ranchers and farmers in the area.

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