Kildare agritech company Terra Nutritech is planning increased international growth in the coming months to grow turnover to €15m over the next three years.
The firm has designed a dosing system for sprinkling precisely measured amounts of essential liquid minerals for animal health into farm water systems.
“The way I would always describe what we do to somebody who’s not in the agricultural sector is that we have developed basically an espresso machine to put Berocca for cows into water,” said CEO Padraig Hennessy.
The system provides two way information between farmer and supplier: “So from our office here in Kildare I can see on to a farm anywhere in the world to see what animals are feeding, the dosage rates and how much stock is left.”
Despite the pandemic, the Moone-based firm has experienced 35pc growth this year and still expects to move into new markets in the coming months, he said.
“This year we’ve expanded into Germany and Belgium. Before the end of the year, we aim to be in Denmark, the Czech Republic, Uruguay and Hungary. We’re talking to poultry providers in North Africa and to large companies in the US and Far East.
“We see rapid expansion in the next three years. We developed all our technology so that it was hugely scalable. From day one we set out to develop the product as a disrupter to the incumbents in the market. We knew once we got traction we could scale very quickly,” he said.
The company has been self-funded with investment of €3m to date.
“We bootstrapped the whole way,” said Hennessy. “Most companies our size look to venture capital or other institutional investors. We’ve taken a slightly different view on things, being greedy to be honest, trying to retain the shares ourselves. That has possibly meant we have grown a small bit slower in the last couple of years, but we believe now we’re at the stage where we can actually grow and take it to the next level.”
Original Farming Independant article by Fearghal O’Connor was published here.