Meet the man who turns Iowa's trash fruit into N.Y. cosmetics An Iowa chemist, the Walter White of hedge balls, harvests rural oil for supermodel skin.

BLOOMFIELD, Ia. — I received a hot tip about a guy in Davis County paying $100 per pickup load of hedge balls.

That struck me as Iowa's oddest harvest.

I had no idea I’d end up meeting the Walter White of southern Iowa, a chemist whose product of choice is not the pure crystal meth of "Breaking Bad," but the pure oil extracted from what's widely considered to be a junk fruit.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, hedge balls became a Midwest fixture in the 19th century. Pioneer farmers planted lines of dense hedge trees to contain their livestock before the innovation of barbed wire.

Now Todd Johnson, 51, a chemist and entrepreneur born and raised in Bloomfield, is turning this neglected bounty into gold. He's trademarked "pomifera," after the scientific name for the fruit, "Maclura pomifera." His company, Osage Healthcare Inc., produces oil for use in the cosmetics industry.

Local farmers, 4-H kids and the Amish bring him hedge balls that they've scavenged off the prairie. Johnson said that he ends up paying $180 per ton, compared with a market value of about $120 per ton of corn.

“I think I’m the hedge ball kingpin of the U.S.,” he said.

I’m inclined to believe him after a visit to Johnson's rural operation inside a machine shed near the Missouri border in Davis County. It's where piles of hedge balls begin to be shredded and processed to harvest their oil.

This fledgling agricultural juggernaut is all the more surprising given just how lowly hedge balls are regarded.

Some people prefer to call this sticky fruit “hedge apples.” Or “Osage oranges,” after the common name for the trees. "Monkey balls." "Horse apples."

Today, despite complete lack of scientific proof, many people still believe that hedge balls repel spiders, insects, rodents and maybe even unannounced visits by your annoying Aunt Ethel.

Richard Jauron, a horticulturist with Iowa State University Extension in Ames, sees nothing more than an enduring urban myth.

“The only way you’re going to kill a spider is to drop (the hedge ball) on the spider,” he added. “That’ll do it.”

But next month, LimeLight will begin selling oil from this unappreciated fruit for $85 per half ounce.

Earlier this year, Johnson inked a deal with LimeLight, a product line from cosmetics company Alcone that plays up its emphasis on natural ingredients.

Johnson, who earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at Indiana University, already had launched what he calls “Iowa’s only professional hair-care company” under his Pomifera brand.

“I’m a legitimate scientist in an industry that’s all about fluff,” he joked. “I’m the biggest nerd that you’ll ever see in this industry.”

If he was grilled on “Shark Tank," Johnson would estimate his company's worth to be somewhere between $2 million to $7 million. We'll see whether Alcone helps make Iowa hedge-ball oil a phenomenon among New York supermodels.

Cedar Rapids-based hair stylist and beauty blogger Kendra Aarhus turned out to be Johnson's crucial industry link.

"My head started spinning, actually, because the beauty industry by and large is wanting to be more organic," Aarhus said of her reaction to hedge balls. "And the idea that this product had practically a negative carbon footprint really speaks rather loudly to people that want to invest."

It was Aarhus' chance encounter with the LimeLight CEO during a conference in Chicago that set up the phone call for Johnson to make his pitch.

Johnson had been the first CEO of KemPharm, a Coralville firm developing a less addictive version of the pain drug hydrocodone. The company in April scored a $54 million initial public offering.

Before that, Johnson led research and development for another Iowa drug manufacturer, Cambrex, in Charles City.

Studies in recent years established that hedge balls do have anti-inflammatory and anti-fungal properties, but not enough to justify the millions of dollars necessary to push health uses through the Federal Drug Administration.

The realm of cosmetics and consumer health, however, is more forgiving than the high stakes of big pharma.

It's much easier for Johnson to produce a skin product that suggests “good results” with “alleviating” eczema, psoriasis and rosacea, plus "unprecedented hydration and healing properties for both the hair and skin."

His wife, Susan, a certified nurse, was one of the first people to test it on her skin. The couple has two daughters: One is a junior at the University of Iowa; the other is a high school junior in Mount Pleasant.

Johnson also served as his own guinea pig. He even once drank the oil to test its effects.

Hedge-ball fascination inherited

Hedge balls for Johnson always have been a family affair.

Early on his great uncle, Don Prevo, told stories about how their ancestors would slice the fruit in half and rub it on scrapes as a cheap salve during the Great Depression.

Prevo, a hematologist in Chicago, nagged his great nephew while the chemist was enrolled in graduate school in the early 1990s to try to isolate the medicinal compounds in hedge balls.

Meanwhile, Johnson also noticed that squirrels would smash the hedge balls, ignoring the fruit to focus on eating the seeds — another sign for the scientist that the seeds (about 11 percent of the fruit by weight) were the true source of nutrients.

Once his career had boomeranged back to southern Iowa and he was surrounded by hedge balls, all he needed were business partners. Enter his hometown buddies from Success Bank, Neal Logan (CEO) and Dan Thompson (president).

Johnson and Thompson graduated together in 1982, and Logan followed four years later.

The other crucial hedge-ball helper is lifelong friend Erik Tjaden, whose Tjaden Biosciences in Burlington is the lab where Johnson extracts his oil from the seeds, rids it of its earthy (or putrid) scent and refines it to within 1 micron clarity.

Johnson and Tjaden met in 1984 as classmates at the University of Iowa, where Johnson was inspired to pursue chemistry by his professor, Lou Messerle.

Johnson often wonders how his life would be different if he hadn't met Messerle and discovered his true passion.

In that sense, the Walter White comparison breaks down: Johnson has fulfilled the legitimate entrepreneurial dreams that eluded Bryan Cranston's iconic character.

'Basically like gold mining'

Johnson's quaint farm factory relies on converted vintage farm implements and household appliances.

The hedge balls first are ground into a bright green pulp, a mash that sort of resembles wheelbarrows full of cole slaw or chunky guacamole.

The slop is further refined to isolate and clean the seeds from the rest of the fruit. Water is a key part of the process as workers carefully sluice through the harvest.

“It’s basically like gold mining,” Johnson said.

The seeds are dried in — what else? — a secondhand dryer whose rear vent is simply connected by a hose to a plastic 5-gallon bucket topped with a screen.

“I’ve done about everything,” employee Bob Newland said of his reaction to his new agricultural trade in what had been nuisance fruit. “Nothing surprises me.”

Johnson’s own father, Doy, 74, is factory foreman.

“I’m proud of him,” the retired painter for John Deere said of his chemist son.

The old laborer agrees with horticulturist Jauron that Johnson may have found the one valid use for hedge balls.

“We kick spiders out of these all the time," Doy said, gesturing to the big green piles.

Oil baron of a different sort

If pure hedge-ball oil becomes the darling of the cosmetics market (the new coconut oil, as Aarhus put it), a professional engineering firm will swoop in to fully automate Johnson's panning-for-gold process in rural southern Iowa.

But this agrarian Heisenberg already has mulled other angles.

He thinks the hedge ball fruit can be developed into an exfoliate.

A doctor is helping him test hedge-ball oil as a colorectal remedy.

He hopes to make biodiesel fuel from the plant oil extracted from nuisance weeds that grow on mediocre soil.

In other words, this chemist aims to become a different sort of oil baron on the Iowa prairie.

To think that he started with a single hedge ball and a pair of tweezers.

He often speaks to schoolkids to promote science education and spread his gospel:

"It is totally cool to be a nerd," he said.

Once again I'm inclined to agree. So much of the time we seem to focus on what's missing or what has disappeared from rural Iowa. Well, here's a native son making the most of what's still around — what had been overlooked until a curious chemist saw it through different eyes.

How do you like them apples?

Where to get hedge-ball oil

Johnson sells his pure hedge-ball oil through his pomifera.com website, where it currently retails for $99.95 per half ounce. You can reach Johnson at 319-572-7993 or tjohnson@osagehealthcare.com.