Team
Thirty-eight people, eleven of them in the field.
Colonize Bio was founded in 2022 by two soil microbiologists and an arable agronomist. The company is deliberately weighted towards field agronomy and quality control rather than sales, because the assessment and the batch specification are what the product depends on.
Leadership
Who is accountable for what
There is no account management layer. The agronomist who assesses a field is the one who writes the season review for it.
Joris van Alphen — Managing Director
Twenty-two years in row-crop agronomy across Minnesota, Iowa and the eastern Dakotas, latterly in a cooperative advisory role. Co-founded Colonize Bio in 2022 to build a company that would publish the trials in which the product did nothing.
Minneapolis
Strategy, state registration
Dr Elke Bergsma — Head of Research
PhD in soil microbiology, previously eight years on rhizosphere colonisation at a public research institute. Owns strain selection, the qPCR colonisation thresholds, and the decision on which candidate strains never reach a label.
Minneapolis
Strain research, trial design
Sander Kuipers — Head of Production and Quality
Runs the 45,000 sq ft Rosemount fermentation and formulation site. Signs the release CFU count on every batch and the end-of-life specification that the batch certificate is measured against.
Rosemount
Fermentation, batch release
Anouk Verhoeven — Head of Field Agronomy
Leads the eleven field agronomists and the strip-trial network across nine states. Responsible for the untreated-strip rule, and for the assessments that end in a recommendation not to buy.
Field-based
Assessments, trials, reviews
How the team is built
Field-weighted, deliberately.
Twenty-six of the thirty-eight staff work in agronomy, production or research. We have turned down distribution in three further states because we could not staff the assessment work behind them.
| Function | People | Based | Owns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Field agronomy | 11 | MN, IA, IL, NE, ND, SD | Assessments, application cards, strip trials, season reviews |
| Fermentation and quality control | 9 | Rosemount | Production, CFU release testing, batch certificates, stability |
| Strain and formulation research | 6 | Minneapolis | Strain screening, colonisation qPCR, tank-mix compatibility |
| Regulatory | 4 | Minneapolis | Territory registration, organic listings, label compliance |
| Logistics and operations | 5 | Rosemount | Cold-chain dispatch, order handling, pack traceability |
| Finance and administration | 3 | Minneapolis | Contracts, reporting, data protection |
Fermentation has never been outsourced, because the release specification is the product.
Research and collaboration
Where the work is done with others.
Strip trials are run with growers and independent advisers rather than in-house only, because a result we produce and score ourselves is not evidence.
Grower trial network
412 replicated strip trials across nine states since 2023, hosted on commercial fields under normal farm operations.
Independent scoring
Stand counts, tissue tests and residue scoring on long-term sites are read by advisers who are not paid on product volume.
Published distribution
Every trial entered into the programme database appears in the published response distribution, including the sites that came in below the untreated strip.
Research, agronomy and press enquiries reach the team at agronomy@colonize.bio, or through the contact page.