The Sacramento Inno Awards recognize some of the year's most talented and successful players in the tech and startup community. This year, the Business Journal recognized companies, products, and leaders in the innovation space. Biome Makers Inc. is one of this year's Innovative Companies of the Year.
It has been a big year for Biome Makers Inc. This year the company outgrew its incubator space in Davis and moved into a new 4,200-square-foot Davis headquarters and testing center.
The company is on track to make $10 million in revenue this year, CEO Adrian Ferrero said. More than 75% of their customers come back to get their services more than once.
“The good thing about agriculture is they might be slow on adoption, but once they adopt a technology, they are slow to stop,” Ferrero said.
Biome Makers helps agronomists give farmers better advice on how to treat their soil, to not only improve their crops, but to maintain the health of the soil in the long term.
The company sequences the DNA of the microbes in a soil sample, and can use that data to tell if a farmer is over-tilling, applying the wrong fertilizer, or in some other way hurting the health of the soil.
“These microbes play a crucial role in the growth of the plants,” Ferrero said.
Ferrero and his co-founders are originally from Spain, where large parts of the country’s historic growing regions are at risk in the coming years, as the soil becomes less and less able to support life.
“We haven’t seen the soil as a living entity when it comes to agriculture,” Ferrero said.
A healthy soil biome can produce better, healthier crops, with less need for external supplements like fertilizers and pesticides. It also sequesters carbon — healthy soil is able to take in more CO2 and store it, instead of releasing into the atmosphere.
“All of us are going to benefit more from healthier soil,” Ferrero said.
Now, Biome Makers is working on making its knowledge and insights accessible to more agronomists and farmers. It is developing an artificial intelligence-fueled tool that can make forecasts and predict the profile of a field without the need for a soil sample.
“We have been working on and investing a lot of time and money on developing these tools,” Ferrero said.
One of the company’s biggest challenges, Ferrero said, is earning the trust of its agriculture industry customers, who tend to be hesitant to adopt new technology.
“The main growth barrier that we are facing is uncertainty,” Ferrero said. “We have to show that the main technology is reliable, and that it is something you can trust and something you can rely on.”
Nearly 10 years after founding the company, Ferrero said they are seeing their gradual inroads into the industry paying off.
“We have the best investors that we could have, because they understand this process and they are patient,” Ferrero said.
