Peter Schott and his collaborators at Genesis Feed Technologies are bringing “the feed” to livestock feed—their product is a web platform that streamlines communications between the many fluid sectors of the livestock feed industry.

The customers Genesis Feed Technologies caters to include feed manufacturers, pre-mix distributors, nutrition consultants, and ingredient buyers. They all play distinct roles in getting feed to farmers’ animals—in the right formula, and at the right price.

The way the feed business works in a nutshell is like this, per Schott: Farmers have livestock, and they work with nutritionists to get recommendations about what kind of feed formulas they should be giving to their animals. Then they go to feed manufacturers and tell them what kind of formula they need made, and the feed manufacturers make it for them. In this day and age, each step of that feed transaction process involves personnel using software platforms.

“Each group has their own little systems,” Schott said. “We try to fill in the gaps between those systems.”

Genesis Feed Technologies is a business-to-business vendor. They sell to the nutritionists and the feed manufacturers, and farmers benefit further down the line from the more efficient service they are able to receive.

Genesis’ platform allows the different players in feed to have a more global and transparent understanding of the other steps in the process.

Right now Gensis’ platform is optimized for desktop and tablet, with mobile capability a possibility for the future.

One of the company’s ambitions in the future is re-thinking the value of commodities and ingredients in the industry, in order to better determine what metrics are most important for feed purchasers to consider.

“We’re working to completely change and re-educate the industry,” Schott said.

Schott got into the feed business “by accident.” He lived in the Dominican Republic for years, and upon moving back to the states he was looking to get back into a tech job. He ended up going to work for Feed Management Systems. Schott grew up on a grain farm, but he didn’t know much about livestock farming or the details of the feed business going into the position. He found that the software systems involved in the industry were not as agile as they could been, and it bothered him even then that no one seemed to be trying to do something with them.

“There was so much opportunity to innovate and do things in that space,” Schott said.

Schott’s co-founders of Genesis Feed Technologies are Matthew Clark and Philip Reindal, both friends of Schott’s with feed industry and computer science backgrounds, respectively. The seed of the business was planted when Schott gave Clark a call to ask about the viability of a software platform to organize the process of formulating and manufacturing feed.

“I’ve been really excited to see how this initial idea of connecting people and systems is starting to come together in real ways,” Schott said.

Schott will be presenting on Genesis Feed Technologies’ work at 1 Million Cups Fargo on Wednesday, June 20.