Hammond company wins AgriNovus innovation challenge
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Hammond-based FiberX will use its $25,000 grand prize from AgriNovus Indiana’s Producer-Led Innovation Challenge to commercialize its services and products. The company sources and converts corn stover into a feedstock for use in the chemical and materials sectors.
Corn stover is the material left on the corn field after harvesting, including stalks, leaves and husks.
FiberX uses that material to make natural fiber-reinforced plastic polymer pellets and fiber for the plastic injection molding industry. The biocomposite plastics can both provide more strength and be cost effective than petroleum-based plastic polymers, the company said.
Speaking on a special edition of the Agbioscience podcast available Wednesday morning, FiberX co-founder and CEO Dave Skibinski said his company is creating an entire new industry.
“We are taking Indiana’s largest–and, in fact, the world’s largest–agricultural waste product, corn stover, we are taking that responsibly off Indiana farms,” Skibinski said. “We are paying the farmers a fair rate for it, so it is now turning a waste product into a cash crop, and we are transforming that into a feedstock to replace the use of oil to make a wide variety of products that are used in the world.”
Skibinksi said 12% of the world’s oil serves as a feedstock for the chemicals industry annually, and he wants FiberX to replace a large portion of that with materials that are made from corn stover.
“Producers are always looking for better ways to make our farms more efficient,” Denise Scarborough, Indiana Soybean Alliance board director, said in a news release. “New technology is a key way to achieve those goals. ISA is excited to continue supporting this contest. There were many interesting and diverse projects; it was very difficult to select one, clear winner.”
The company has received other funding from Conexus Indiana through a Manufacturing Readiness Grant and for Elevate Ventures through an Innovation Voucher.
Skibinski said the company will continue to look for additional funding and search out additional corn growers throughout the state to harvest more corn stover, as well as plastics companies for distribution.
The Producer-Led Innovation Challenge is a partnership between the Indiana Corn Marketing Council and the Indiana Soybean Alliance. The goal of the competition is to create “new revenue streams from current on-farm processes to increase efficiency and return on investment for producers’ operations.”
Purdue DIAL Ventures also gave grant to two Purdue University student teams: $4,000 for EcoTrack’s digitally enabled audit management system and $2,000 for YieldSmart’s precision agriculture solution focused on data-backed decision making.