Even though Soil Steam International AS was established in February 2016, this story starts a long time before that. Kjell Westrum, Arvid Laksesvela and Olav Wirgenes were all farmers and were running their own farms. They were also active in the organizations representing the growers of Norwegian vegetables. There were many trips around in Norway controlling harvests etc. It was under these trips they started to discuss alternatives solutions to fight fungi, weeds, and other harmful pathogens in the soil. After a while, they hooked up with other people both in Norway and in Holland and they found out that steam has been used as a method of controlling specially weeds problems for many years before the chemicals came. They started to do some research around this and wanted to go further. Sometimes in the 1990ies, they built the first simple soil steam equipment. You can see it in the pictures. It was a very simple unit based on simple principles…. But it worked… It was slow and ineffective, but it worked. They did tests together with Planteforsk (today Nibio) which documented that their simple prototype was effectively reducing the weeds and fungi in the soil. The equipment was not effective, and it was difficult to handle, but that did not matter now. The most important was that it worked!
