International company lands in St. Joseph for North American facility
By Kyle Schmidt
A South African-based agricultural technology business has made St. Joseph its first North American base.
Microbial Biological Fertilizers International is a family-owned company that specializes in green chemistry, bio-stimulants, inoculants and adjuvants with a focus on crop technologies. The goal is to provide growers with effective and sustainable crop inputs.
“We really want to be in the heart of the Midwest so we made our home in St. Joseph,” Steven Etherington, MBFI’s North America managing director, said. “While we’ve specifically looked at North America, we see that as a very attractive and strategic market, which complements our global footprint and our fermentation and production capacity.”
The multinational company has facilities in South America as well as the U.S. and Africa. Its new location at 4006 S. 40th St. in St. Joseph has a laboratory and other sections for the process of creating the company’s product.
MBFI uses a technology called SaxSym.
“We have four microbiology laboratories globally as well as one chemistry laboratory,” Etherington said. “It takes us five to seven years to really look at launching a product.”
The process starts with screening different isolates and figuring out what to achieve with them.
“From there we give to our team of microbiologists and chemists and they will start to screen all the different isolates to look at, for example, maximizing route architecture,” Etherington said. “It will go through different species, different strains that we would select from the swirls or we would go through and culture collection bank that we would start to grow up in the laboratory through the whole screening phase.”
Products then grow in chambers, and once something stands out the company starts to upscale.
The St. Joseph facility has a small crew but Etherington said he’s proud of his team.
“The people of our business, we’ve been going for 20 years and we really have dedicated staff that really see the vision they’ve bought into, the vision of what MBFI is and what is the mission and vision statement of our business,” Etherington said. “They are the difference at big differentiator for our business that we’ve seen.”
