b'DAN CUSTIS CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, ABM @ABM1stDan@abm1st.comabm1st.comWhat is Your Aha Moment?AS THE NEW YEARapproaches, I sometimes feel like I haveFast forward to 2006. We were four years into our R&D to stop and pinch myself2020 will mark 20 years in businessprocess on an encapsulation agent. The State of Ohio was work-for ABM. We established the company in July of 2000. Beforeing with us on our production facility and we couldnt move any ABM, I had spent the majority of my career in the seed industryfurther ahead until we filed a patent on our technology. We knew selling commercial seed treatments, mostly chemistries and poly- we were close, but we needed a breakthrough.mers, but no inoculants. At that time, seed inoculants were mostly applied by farmers.The Aha MomentHowever, some seed retailers would apply inoculants and extend- Gary and I were shooting the breeze one morning, and I was ers, which prolong the viability of the inoculant on the seed, iftelling him about a conversation Id recently had with my wife farmers brought in their own soybeans. I believed there couldabout cornstarchhow it is used to thicken different things like be a major market for inoculant application at the seed com- gravies, etc. Gary looked at me and said, Aha! I know what were pany level. This would offer seed companies two major benefits:going to use. It wasnt the cornstarch that worked, but another another marketing tool and an additional income stream.starch-based material we were able to mix with the Bradyrhizobia If we could find an encapsulating agent for the nitrogen-fixingto encapsulate the organism.bacteria species in a soybean inoculant, the organism would beWe filed the patent in September and introduced the product able to survive a commercial seed treater and stay viable on theExcalibre at the American Seed Trade Associations annual Corn, seed for much longer. My goal was 120 days, a target the seedSoybean, Sorghum and Seed Expo in Chicago in December. inoculant industry said couldnt be done. Thus far, even with anNobody believed the inoculant could survive 120 days, but we extender, 30 days after application was the longest survival periodhad the data to prove it. of soybean inoculant on seed, and this was at the farmer level. The encapsulation technology we had developed became one I brought this concept to Gary Harman around 2002, who wasof our base technologies and made us unique in the marketplace. working with fungi, which forms spores that last a very long timeWe were one of the pioneers in shifting soybean inoculant from when stored at the right temperature. We were both creativebeing applied at the farmer level to the seed company level. thinkers and we educated each other about our areas of exper- People often think when innovative products are released into tisemy experience in the seed industry and his as a scientistthe marketplace, its some kind of overnight success. Nothing conducting research at Cornell University. is further from the truth. It took four years of trial and error. We The Bradyrhizobium strain, which is used in soybean inocu- never gave up. We were certain we had this thing whipped, we lants, is a gram-negative bacterium that is quite sensitive: ifjust needed the right combination of bacteria, water, encapsulat-you dont treat it right, it dies. We came up with a number ofing agent and a carrier.Perseverance, belief in yourself and your concepts, including some based on our research into how theidea, and creative thinking are all critical to developing new tech-pharmaceutical and, to a lesser extent, food processing industriesnologies and products. Also, it didnt hurt that people told me it were encapsulating bacteria. couldnt be done I was driven to prove them wrong. We were exploring materials to use as an encapsulating agent.Twenty years later, were still coming up with new products We tried freeze drying, spray drying, and every other kind of dryingthat have evolved from the encapsulation technology. Today, Im you can think of, to create a product that would be viable afteras excited about some of the technologies our team has been being put through a commercial seed treater. We wanted the rhizo- developing in 2019, as I was all those years ago with our encapsu-bia to survive 120 days on the soybean seed, which is the windowlation technology breakthrough. seed companies needed.What elements are driving breakthroughs in your company Companies were developing similar technologies for othertoday? industries. None of them worked on Bradyrhizobium. Not one.JANUARY 2020SEEDWORLD.COM /39'