Waste Farmers wins JumpStart Biz Plan grand prize, plans to double staff in 2014

Denver-based Waste Farmers won the City of Denver's JumpStart Biz Plan competition for 2013.

"We're setting out to disrupt agriculture and change agriculture," says Founder and CEO John-Paul Maxfield. "We think the future of agriculture is small. We're basically a bunch of transscendentalist hippies."

The company currently has about 13 employees, but is growing. "I think we'll double that next year," Maxfield says. "We're expecting to triple our sales volume."

Agriculture "has become big and it's going to become decentralized again," he adds, noting that lawns take up 40 million acres of land in the U.S. -- double the land occupied by the country's cotton fields.

Against this backdrop, many observers say agriculture will soon have a hard time keeping up with worldwide population growth. "Maybe the simplest solution is having people grow at home again," says Maxfield.

Waste Farmers sold its compost-collecting business to Alpine Waste & Recycling in late 2011. Since the sale, Waste Farmers has focused on launching a pair of retail brands of bagged soil products: Maxfield's and Batch 64.

Maxfield's aims to become "the Patagonia of home agriculture," says Maxfield, while Batch 64 -- named for the Colorado constitutional amendment of the same number -- targets professionals.

"Soil for us is a foundation," says Maxfield. "New products are in the works, particularly on the Maxfield's side."

The Waste Farmers' production facility and farmstead, dubbed the "microbe brewery" by Maxfield, is located northwest of Denver in unincorporated Jefferson County, but the company's headquarters remains in Denver. "We're an ag company, so we needed ag zoning," he explains.

Office space at Galvanize was part of the JumpStart prize, along with $50,000 and plenty of in-kind services, and Maxfield says Waste Farmers will use it as the company's public face in the city. "We just love the energy there," he says.