COMPANY
Built for ag. Grounded in science.
Reform Bio was founded at the intersection of agriculture and materials science.
Kyle Anderson brought experience from farming, agricultural businesses, product development and company building. Santanu Bakshi, PhD, brought more than a decade of Iowa State University research into biochar, nutrient adsorption, surface chemistry and slow-release fertilizer systems.
Together, they saw an opportunity to move promising nutrient science out of the laboratory and into fertilizer products designed around the realities of modern agriculture.
Kyle Anderson, eMBA
Co-Founder & CEO
Startup mentor at THRIVE SVG Ventures & ISU.
Family grain farmer.
Entrepreneur and product management leader spanning Fortune 500 - startups.
Santanu Bakshi, PhD
Co-Founder
Principal Scientist, Iowa State University Bioeconomy Institute
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering
WHY REFORM BIO EXISTS
Fertilizer is too important to ignore.
Fertilizer sits underneath food production, farm economics, water quality, energy use and global resource security.
Yet conventional fertilizer systems can lose significant amounts of nutrients before crops use them. Reform Bio exists to rethink how those nutrients are delivered, retained and ultimately used by the crop.
Read the Reform Bio ManifestoBUILT IN IOWA
Built in Iowa. Designed to scale regionally.
Reform Bio is headquartered in Iowa, close to growers, land-grant research, agricultural infrastructure and the feedstocks that can support regional fertilizer production.
Our long-term manufacturing model is regional by design. Carbon-rich residuals already exist across forestry, agriculture and food processing. We see an opportunity to convert those materials closer to where they originate and manufacture fertilizer closer to the agricultural markets that use it.
The goal is a network of regional production nodes built around available feedstock, fertilizer demand and existing agricultural infrastructure.
REGIONAL FEEDSTOCK THERMAL CONVERSION FERTILIZER MANUFACTURING AGRICULTURAL CHANNELS
WHAT WE'RE WORKING TOWARD
Better Fertilizer. Cleaner Water. Stronger Farms.
Better Fertilizer.
We build fertilizer designed to keep more nutrients where crops can use them instead of losing them through leaching, volatilization and other loss pathways.
Cleaner Water.
When fewer nutrients move beyond the root zone and into waterways, agriculture can reduce nutrient pollution and the downstream impacts it creates for aquatic ecosystems, wildlife and the communities that depend on clean water.
Stronger Farms.
Better nutrient efficiency can improve grower economics while reducing synthetic nitrogen requirements and the carbon intensity of crop production. At the same time, Reform Bio's biochar-based platform incorporates durable biogenic carbon into the agricultural system.
The opportunity is to make fertilizer work harder for the crop, lose less to the environment and create better economics for the grower.