Kansas Startup Takes Award At NCBiotech Ag Biotech Showcase

PrairieChar, a Kansas company developing a system to convert animal manure into useful products, won the $10,000 cash prize and $3,500 in legal and financial advice at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s 2017 Ag Biotech Entrepreneurial Showcase.

Event sponsors Smith Anderson, the Raleigh-based law firm, and accounting firm Hughes Pittman Gupton, are providing the in-kind services…

Integrated Animal Health, also based in Kansas, which finds and commercializes medicine and foods for pets and farm animals, won the $2,500 cash second prize.

They were among 12 Ag bio startups that presented over the two-day event. Five are located in North Carolina, and the others are in Norway, Kansas, Missouri, Switzerland, Florida and California.

PrairieChar Chairman and CEO Robert Herrington said he started the company because his wife made him buy her a horse farm. He suffered a broken back when a tree fell on him as he was clearing a pasture. Lying in bed recuperating, he called friends in California and asked them to send him business plans to review. One caught his eye.

“We’re in the manure business,” Herrington said of what has become his new adventure. “We take something you don’t want and turn it into something you do.”