While she didn’t grow up on a farm, Bianca Bailey always had a fascination with agriculture and engineering.
The summer before sixth grade, the Texas native attended a research apprenticeship program at Kentucky State University where she took soil samples from a tomato farm and examined pesticide infiltration in groundwater. Fast forward to when she was working on her master’s degree and her research entailed using tea to kill human and pig rotavirus.
“I had this entrepreneurial aspect to me, and I wanted to do something in water treatment,” Bailey told FarmWeek, adding she also was encouraged down that path by an adviser.
While earning her doctorate at the University of Illinois, Bailey took her entrepreneurial spirit to the next level, launching Agriwater, an ag tech company innovating mobile water systems for livestock waste.
And this year, the U of I graduate and Illinois Farm Bureau member was named a top 10 competitor for American Farm Bureau Federation’s Ag Innovation Challenge and has a chance to win $100,000 to help expand her technology.
“I was doing my PhD in agricultural and biological engineering at the time at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and I have a background in chemical engineering and environmental engineering, so when I approached my research topic, I was looking for what are some ways that I can use my water treatment knowledge and chemical engineering knowledge to improve water as it relates to agriculture,” she said.
During her research, she came across an old technique of applying electricity to liquid, called electro coagulation. She then read an article about electrifying animal manure to clean water.
“And I said, ‘Maybe there’s something here.’ … So, I got manure from the University of Illinois dairy farm, my adviser and I built a prototype where it had sensors and it housed 5 liters of manure, and we built this (prototype) that looks like a battery,” she said. “It was a lot of tests. …At first it wasn’t working, and I decided to change up the manure mixing.”
The next morning when Bailey returned to the lab, she was elated.
“I opened the lab door and I looked at the experiment, and the water was cleaned. The solids and the filth were kind of a layer on the bottom of the water, and then the clean water was sitting on top.
“I was jumping up and down in this lab by myself because this was during COVID.”
With early support from the iVenture Accelerator at the U of I, Bailey founded Agriwater, which transforms livestock manure water into commercially valuable byproducts.
After earning her doctorate, she secured funding from the Department of Energy and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to commercialize the technology.
Today, Agriwater is backed by an angel investor, Techstars Water Tech & Sustainability and the AgTech gBeta of Gener8tor, propelling the company toward scaling its impact. Since its launch, Agriwater has raised nearly half a million dollars, expanded its team, and won multiple awards, including the 2023 Climate Tech Inclusion Award from Evergreen Climate Innovation and U.S. Bank. Now, Agriwater is gearing up for full-scale manufacturing, delivering its manure-to clean water systems to early adopters, and raising a pre-seed funding round to transform waste into value at scale.
The AFBF Ag Innovation Challenge is a chance for Bailey to take the company to the next level. Entrepreneurs present to a panel of judges their emerging ideas and businesses in the agricultural industry, with a chance to earn $100,000 in startup funds. AFBF is offering a total of $145,000 in funding throughout the course of the competition.
“I want to be on that stage, and I want to tell everybody what I’m doing. That’s the goal,” Bailey said, adding she’s applied for the award several times. “It just goes to show it’s about endurance, and you have to just keep trying.”
Bailey is competing with nine other innovators to be named in the top four, who will compete at AFBF’s Annual Convention in Anaheim, California, in January. The top four will be announced Sept. 10.
One of the benefits for farmers with the technology, Bailey said, is it will ease the burden of clogged irrigation lines for producers who use manure to irrigate.
“We can remove the solids from the manure to have a better, smoother irrigation process,” Bailey said. “Also, we can help reduce the potential of leaching toxic manure into the rivers that will help with environmental compliance. And for the drought-prone areas like California and Arizona, being able to produce clean water from manure on site will help them with drought, as well as reducing the cost of them having to pay for water to be piped into their farm.”
Cost savings on water bills and fertilizer also are benefits.
“And as we’re cleaning this water, we’re actually reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses that are escaping, because it’s not just sitting out in the open,” Bailey said.
Bailey’s vision for the company is to have Agriwater on every livestock farm.
“Our tagline is turning poop into profit,” she said.