Sean Smith, the head proprietor and brewer of Crooked Farmz, is originally from Kingston, ON, but has been growing vegetables in the East York area for the past 18 years. His interest in developing a local CSA for composting and compost tea brewing emerges from deeper underlying concerns about soil health, microbial life, climate change, and our relationships with land and water.

In 2019 Sean won first place in the DIY Innovation category in the Best in GrowTO urban gardening competition for improvements to an urban composting method, and he repeated in 2020 in the Professional Innovation category with an inexpensive design for a scalable compost tea brewer. In 2021 Crooked Farmz won for the third time with an open source schematic for producing quality biodiverse composts in a limited footprint.

In Spring 2020 Crooked Farmz won a Landscape Ontario Horticultural Trades Association bursary to develop compost tea workshop resources in the Greater Toronto Area. Sean has received awards for entrepreneurial distinction from Acadia University and the University of Alberta, and was profiled in 2020 by the web site Humans Who Grow Food.