Agmine is eyeballing real estate to put sales, IT and its warehouse under one roof as it juggles growing both the IT and feed formulation sides of their animal health and nutrition company.

The St. Louis agtech firm launched in 2015 and currently has six full time employees plus several contractors who are also stakeholders. The company has a feed formulation warehouse in St. Louis city, but the headquarters, sales and IT development are done remotely.

Tom D’Alfonso, Agmine CEO

“It’s just better for companies to have people, have space, to work together and in all aspects of the business,” CEO Tom D’Alfonso told the 4thEst8. “Having space to bring new people into the company… we’re really at that stage of growth where we’re beyond ‘proof of concept’ with our products and services. Up until about last year, we were very much a consulting-based company… we’re able to, now, scale up our manufacturing, scale up our blending, and bring in more people, particularly in sales and technical services.”

Many things influence animal health, including behavior, temperature, air quality, etc. After a long career at DuPont in animal agriculture D’Alfonso says it became clear that the best way for farmers to evaluate new feed technology is through sensors, statistics, and real-time data – so they can quickly put in place animal health products that address the problem they’re facing today.

Growing pains

Like a lot of startup founders D’Alfonso says he sold customers what they needed, even if it wasn’t the whole package – so long as it was in the Agmine wheelhouse. This year he wants to pull it all together with all the existing customers, and new customers.

“It’s hard to define ourselves because we may have a customer where we were selling them (the animal feed binding product) Dura-Pellet, but now we’re coming in, we’re selling them sensors, and they’re like ‘Well, what are you? Are you a product company? Are you a technology company?’” D’Alfonso said. “Likewise, we have our sensors that are indicating, ‘Hey, Customer, during the summertime your laying hens are not consuming enough’ and we have some products that can help with heat stress.”

D’Alfonso says Agmine is an application company. He wants to put together turnkey (brand agnostic) sensors and any animal food or water additive — an Agmine product, or made by someone else — that addresses specific problems so his company can quickly combine the needed feed formula – and the farmer can see the results with the data Agmine provides.

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