Michigan is sitting on a motherlode of potash and Ted Pagano is using $1.3 billion in government funds to mine it and grab market share away from Canada and Russia. 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 nerd’s 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…