After a successful career in the chemical business, Marcus Meadows-Smith embarked on a second act running two companies in Davis that aim to wean agriculture off the use of synthetic chemicals.
A native of Kent, England, Meadows-Smith came to Davis in 2008 to be CEO of AgraQuest, which pioneered the use of biological controls for agriculture as an alternative to chemicals.
“My friends and colleagues were surprised when I left a position managing a $2 billion portfolio to run a company with $10 million in revenue,” he said.
He had been running three chemical divisions of Chemtura Corp., the public company where he worked for 14 years.
In 2012, four years after starting at AgraQuest, he sold the company to Bayer Crop Science for $500 million. “After four years, my friends and peers saw what I was trying to achieve.”
He continued working at Bayer for a year after the acquisition to integrate the merger.
Then in 2013, Meadows-Smith and his wife Jenny started Great Bear Vineyards, a winery in Davis on a historic farm, which they planted with grapes in 2014.
“The winery was supposed to be my retirement plan after I retired from Bayer,” Marcus Meadows-Smith said.
Meadows-Smith jokes that they started it to have a reason to spend time outside in the garden. But the winery has gotten much more serious. It hosts special events, farm dinners, barrel tastings and supports a wine club. Great Bear wines range in price from $19 to $105 per bottle, with some of the wines ranking in the low 90s on Wine Spectator's 100-point scale.
Jenny Meadows-Smith is Great Bear’s winemaker. She’s a chemist and graduated from University of California Davis' winemaking certificate program.
After Bayer, Marcus Meadows-Smith went on to do independent consulting for investment companies.
One of the investors was Menlo Park venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, which was interested in the advanced microbial selection work being done by a New Zealand company. That is the startup that became BioConsortia Inc., which moved its headquarters to Davis and named Meadows-Smith as CEO.
BioConsortia is pioneering soil and plant microbe technology as biostimulants and biopesticides to reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
BioConsortia has 45 employees, most of them scientists. It has nearly 30 researchers in Davis, and a team of six in New Zealand. BioConsortia hasn't generated revenue yet, but it has some big international deals for distribution.
In December 2020, The Mosaic Co. negotiated an exclusive right to distribute BioConsortia's nitrogen-fixing microbial products for major row crops in the Americas. After successful field trials last year, Mosaic in March expanded its collaboration with BioConsortia to include major Asian food-producing countries.
Some of BioConsortia’s products allow for the efficient uptake and use of fertilizers, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulphur. By making plants more efficient at absorbing fertilizers, farmers save money and apply less, which is also beneficial to the environment and waterways, Meadows-Smith said.
Since 2014, BioConsortia has raised more than $40 million from Khosla Ventures and Woodside-based Otter Capital LLC. Otter Capital had been a major investor in AgraQuest.
“AgraQuest was a build. He grew the company to be interesting enough for it to be sold,” said Ashish Malik, CEO of Mississauga, Ontario-based Bee Vectoring Technologies International Inc. Malik was previously in charge of global marketing for AgraQuest for four years, and then head of global marketing of biologics for three years at Bayer Crop Science.
BioConsortia is addressing real world problems, Malik said.
“People don’t want us to use synthetic nitrogen on crops,” he said.
Meadows-Smith trained as a geneticist, with the aim of producing drought-tolerant crops for Africa.
“We thought we were going to save the world by modifying crops to feed the hungry,” he said. Instead, such genetic modification became a public relations nightmare worldwide.
With BioConsortia working on ways to reduce the use of chemicals in the environment, he said he’s now working on efforts that will have the most environmental impact of anything he’s done in his career.
Most fertilizer is wasted, and the amount of energy used to produce it is intense, he said.
Local tech company executives often complain that it’s hard to get investors to come out to the Sacramento area. Meadows-Smith muses that he gets investors to make the trip because he always invites them to the winery.
The Essentials
Title: BioConsortia CEO; assistant winemaker and owner of Great Bear Vineyards.
Age: 60
Education: Bachelor of Science in genetics, University of Birmingham in England, 1984; Advanced Management Program, Harvard Business School, 2004.
Career: CEO BioConsortia, 2014-present; owner, assistant winemaker, Great Bear Vineyards, Davis, 2013-present; head of strategic and business management – biologics at Bayer CropScience, 2012-2013; CEO AgraQuest, 2008-2012; executive vice president, Chemtura Corp., 1993-2004; marketing manager, Sumitomo Corp., 1987-1993.
Personal/family: Married to Jenny, children Holly, Cara, Ruth and Michael. Lives in Davis.
First job, nonprofessional: Working at a green grocer, breeding rabbits.
Something people would be surprised to know about you: Walked and hitchhiked from South Africa to London in about 180 days.
