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Research is the engine behind innovation, commercialization and economic growth across nearly every industry. At ����Ӱ��, that innovation doesn’t stop in the lab; it goes to work. In this episode, we explore how a single research idea can become a commercial product with real regional and global impact.

Houdek, is a South Dakota company born from SDSU research. You’ll hear from alumni and Houdek employees Austin Bushong, a research microbiologist, and Jeremy Javers, vice president of technology, as they share how research led to MEPro — a high-protein feed ingredient made from South Dakota soybeans and used in sustainable aquaculture around the world.

Transcript:

[Heidi] What ways has this research-driven product created new opportunities, you know, impacting not just our state, like in terms of agriculture, bioprocessing, but created relationships with different countries?

[Austin] Yeah, I think there's just a straight up people aspect of it, too, right? I've been part of Prairie Aquatech, now Houdek, since I was an undergrad. And basically as part of its inception, started out as a team of, you know, a dozen people and now what total employment across Houdek is probably a hundred, a hundred-plus people. So, there's just a people part of that puzzle.

[Heidi] Yeah. Creating jobs.

[Austin] Creating, creating jobs and opportunities.

[Heidi] Hello, Jackrabbits Nation. My name is Heidi Bushong, and this is "The Yellow & Blue Podcast." Research is the engine behind innovation, commercialization and economic growth across nearly every industry. At ����Ӱ��, that innovation doesn't stop in the lab. It goes to work.

In this episode, we explore how a single research idea can become a commercial product with real regional and global impact. Houdek is a South Dakota company born from SDSU research. You'll hear from alumni and Houdek employees Austin Bushong, a research microbiologist, and Jeremy Javers, vice president of technology at Houdek, as they share how ME-Pro, a high-protein feed ingredient made from South Dakota soybeans is used in sustainable aquaculture around the world.

Thank you so much for being here today, you guys.

[Austin] Yeah, thank you. Appreciate the opportunity.

[Heidi] For those who may not know, what is Houdek?

[Austin] So for those that don't know, Houdek is a bioprocessing company that takes soybean meal and converts it into a feed ingredient that's used in aquaculture nutrition, pet nutrition and trying to expand into other markets as well.

[Heidi] Like human health.

[Austin] Yeah.

[Heidi] It was formerly known as Prairie Aquatech, but it's, uh, within the last couple of years, been rebranded as Houdek. What is Houdek? Like, what does that stand for?

[Jeremy] In South Dakota, we're fortunate. We have a state soil along with our state bird and, you know, all those types of things, and our state soil is hooded soil, pronounced "who deck." As we started getting into other markets, pet food, and looking at some of the human nutrition stuff, and we have products that go into the cattle markets and you got a little confusing for people and we had to do a bit of a rebrand. Everything we do comes from the soil. Houdek is South Dakota state soil. So, it made a lot of sense for us at the time.

[Austin] I think it demonstrates a lot of our pride in being a company that was founded and established in South Dakota and is operating in South Dakota. Also, Houdek has a connection to me personally, just because the family farm that I grew up on is near Spink County, South Dakota, and Houdek was a first identified as a state soil in Spink County, South Dakota.

[Heidi] That's pretty cool. Your guys' primary product right now is ME-Pro. What was kind of the research that developed that product?

[Jeremy] Around about 2017, the world started farming more fish than we harvested out of the ocean. And in order to farm fish, we have to make feed for all of these fish. And, you know, some of the primary ingredients are what we would call marine ingredients. So, they'd harvest the little fish, sardines, menhaden, things like that. Grind it up, turn it into what we call fish meal. And then that's one of the primary ingredients that goes into feeding farm fish.

Well, as that farm fish industry continued to grow, and majority of the world gets protein from fish, then we started overfishing the little fish and, you know, became a sustainability issue for that industry. We had to turn to plant-based proteins. So, some of the plant-based proteins, especially when you talk about, you know, carnivorous fish like salmon and things like that, things that we like to eat.

They didn't handle a soybean meal, for example, in their diet well. They didn't perform well. And it's because that material has antinutritional factors, the protein levels, you know, around 50%. It's not quite high enough to feed those fish. So, Bill Gibbons and Mike Brown at SDSU, you know, along with some young and aspiring researchers at the time, you know, set out to solve a problem, and I think Austin can probably talk a little bit more about what that process looked like since he was there.

[Austin] Yep. I was there, and it originally started my freshman year of college here at SDSU.

[Heidi] So 2011.

[Austin] So 2011. I grew up on a family farm, not far from Miller, South Dakota, where a lot of the soybean meal we used is produced, but I wasn't as good of a farm kid as my little brother.

So, my sophomore year of college, my dad said, "Find a job." So, I was looking for a job, and I applied to the REU program at SDSU, and Bill Gibbons reached out to me and said, "Hey, I have this idea. It'd be cool. Do you think it's cool what we're trying to accomplish here?"

And I thought it was just because of the concept Bill was working on in his lab tied back into farming without me actually having to try and farm.

[Heidi] And I think that's a pretty cool point, too, that like a lot of universities, you don't get the opportunity to research until you're like a graduate student.

You're a sophomore, you're a 19-year-old, and you're getting experience that eventually led to 11 years of a career professionally and then more as a student.

[Austin] Yeah. And I was extremely grateful for that opportunity. I think it's the reason I have a job, and it's the reason we live here, and I get to do what I love to do while also getting to contribute back to South Dakota agriculture.

[Heidi] Yeah, for sure. Let's talk about that a little more. So how did the concept grow from a lab in Alfred Dairy Science, right, to now there's a research facility in Brookings called the Back 40 and a huge plant in Volga producing a product. How does that translate? There's so many steps in between, but shortly, how does that translate?

[Austin] So, I mean, oftentimes big things start small, right? So, you start at the smaller scale, you start in flasks and work your way up to bigger and bigger and bigger reactors.

So, we started second floor, Alfred Dairy in Bill's lab, working in flasks, little 250 to 1-liter flasks and basically running the process. It's changed a lot, but essentially running the process we're running in that small flask and then testing the resulting product.

And then you scale that up to a bigger reactor, a 5-liter reactor where you can produce more material and then a 70-liter here producing more material. And then eventually to a 1,000-gallon tank. That was that tank that was out at the Brookings airport that we were trying to get enough material because you need to get enough material to test and feed into aquaculture. Right.

You can't, a little five, you'd have to run so many little 5-liters to produce the amount of material you would need to pilot a feed ingredient like ME-Pro. So, we grew from the airport and then the city tech building that was next to Swiftel there, and then eventually the building that is now the Back 40 building and then the Volga, it's just starting small and increasing in scale as you go, figuring out what works, what doesn't work. It's not like it was just a linear path of this works, this works, this works. And we built up to the Volga scale.
I mean, it took a lot of mistakes and foam overs, bioflow foam, foam overs and messes to clean up until you get it right. So.

[Jeremy] Yeah, I think, you know, that's an important sort of concept in this whole process of, you know, scale up and maybe what's just as important is scale down.

So, at some point in time, you know, you're operating in something size of this coffee cup, trying to prove out a concept. And I think it's important for people to understand, you know, you have to go through about 10 cups of coffee before you get a good one.

And, you know, once you have a concept that works, that addresses some need, you know, then I think it's important to start, you know, figuring out what the end looks like.

[Austin] You figure out things as you go to make the process work better.

[Heidi] That's all part of research, right?

[Jeremy] Everything we do is hard. One person told me at one point in time, you know, they picked all the gold up off the ground a long time ago and now we've got a mine for it, so.

[Heidi] We want other research labs on campus to be able to scale up and do the same thing. And different companies can come and try and scale their stuff up.

[Austin] And a lot of times the end product you get changes as you move up in scale.

[Heidi] So MEPro, the ingredient used within fish food for sustainable fish farming, it's made from South Dakota soybeans. A lot of them come from the Miller plant, like Austin had said. What does that mean for like local agriculture and its producers?

[Jeremy] My background was about, you know, 20 years in the ethanol industry when I was a grad student here at SDSU. I was, you know, working at Midwest Seeds at the time, you know, making gels and things like that.

And on my breaks, I would sit out in the back and saw them constructing this thing over by Aurora and, you know, found out it was an ethanol plant and changed jobs shortly thereafter and went out and worked at the ethanol plant and kind of got into that industry.

And a large part of the world's ethanol production was born right here at SDSU and a little building right across the street here.

[Austin] In the little physiology lab.

[Jeremy] Yeah.

And I mean, you can look and see, you know, what does this research really do for agriculture? And I mean, if you just look at that example, we made a market for 6 or 7 billion bushels of corn. And corn today is, you know, four to five dollars per bushel, and everybody's pretty happy about that.

Like you can make money processing it, feeding it. I think that's the No. 1 thing that this type of research really drives for agriculture and for the economy and for South Dakota farmers is, it generates new markets for the crops.

The specific scenario that we have with converting South Dakota soybean meal, you know, there's some other added benefits. So.

[Austin] Just from a straight logistics standpoint. Yeah. It makes logistics is a big input cost to manufacturing and having that being able to be sourced so closely to, I mean, Miller's only 130 miles-ish from Volga.

[Jeremy] So, if you look at our supply chain, right, we take in soybean meal, and we basically are fractionating that into three components. We fractionate that into oil, protein and then a carbohydrate stream. And I mean, that's a big part of how we're adding value to this. And then through our fermentation process, we're also adding, you know, good functional benefits, things that help prebiotics and postbiotics, things that help animal health.

You know, as part of their feed ingredient, the primary output of our product right now goes to Scandinavia. They need all non-GM products that are coming in. So, you know, those farmers that have, you know, really taken on the challenge again, you know, we picked up all the gold a long time ago and farming non-genetically modified soybeans without all the benefits of things like glyphosate and some of the chemicals that can help with weed controls. It's a different type of farming.

But you know, we got about 55,000-60,000 acres that are being produced for us and farmers are doing it well, and they're getting another $2-$3 a bushel for going through that challenge.

[Heidi] There's a market for it.

[Austin] Yeah. And the majority of that is sourced within X mile radius of St. Lawrence already, about 300-mile radius of that plant. I think they try to source all the acres for that.

[Heidi] OK.

[Austin] And most of that encompasses South Dakota.

[Jeremy] And we're short right now. We could use more.

[Austin] We could use more. A good way Jeremy had explained it to me is, I mean, where South Dakota is, we're pretty uniquely positioned. We have the land, the know-how, the farm acres and the processing to produce this ingredient, and then Scandinavia has the waters to actually grow these animals and help sustain these animals. There's domestic markets as well.

[Jeremy] Yeah, it's a great partnership. It's a great international market, and we rely on each other a little bit. The fish farmers in Scandinavia rely on us to grow that crop and convert it, and we rely on them to be a good market output for those products. And it's a unique opportunity that I hope we can hold onto here in South Dakota and continue to grow and replicate.

[Heidi] Let's talk about that a little bit, because for people who are not of a science background like myself, it's kind of a hard concept to grasp, right? How does a soybean feed a fish, right? How is ME-Pro used in aquaculture? What kind of fish consume it?

[Austin] Yeah, so we've had a number of different fish species out at the Back 40 where the recirculating aquaculture system is. We've had tilapia, rainbow trout, Atlantic salmon, both coho and Atlantic salmon, barramundi, which is a sea bass, shrimp. The way one of my colleagues explained to me is rainbow trout and salmon are like the black angus of the aquaculture industry.

[Heidi] Yeah, I can see that yesterday by looking at the fish.

[Austin] Yeah, yeah.

[Jeremy] The supply chains may be interesting to understand, too. So, a lot of people come to us and be like, oh, you make fish food. We make fish food ingredients.

[Austin] We make one ingredient in a diet or ration that has 15-ish other ingredients in it.

[Jeremy] Yeah, so I mean, we make the product in Volga. That gets, you know, when we ship to Scandinavia, that gets loaded onto containers that go on a truck to either a rail transload port or to, which ultimately ends up at a container shipping port and then, you know, heads to Scandinavia. It gets offloaded there, where it goes to feed mills that take that ingredient and then combine it with all those other ingredients and make pellets that then get put on great big feed boats. I had an opportunity to go visit Norway here in August and kind of see the operation. It was pretty cool.

And then they go out and, you know, blow the feed out to the fish. And that's how we raise farm fish.

[Heidi] What ways has this research-driven product created new opportunities, you know, impacting not just our state, like in terms of agriculture, bioprocessing, but created relationships with different countries?

[Austin] Yeah, I think there's just a straight up people aspect of it, too, right? I've been part of Prairie Aquatech now, Houdek, since I was an undergrad and basically as part of its inception, started out as a team of, you know, a dozen people. And now what total employment across Houdek is probably a hundred, a hundred-plus people. So, there's just a people part of that puzzle.

[Heidi] Yeah. Creating jobs, right?

[Austin] Creating, creating jobs and opportunities.

[Jeremy] You know, one powerful thing, I think to create a relationship is to sort of have a common goal. And I think that really helps bring people together, you know, and everybody's sort of working toward something that everybody believes in and can benefit others and, you know, bring economic benefit to farmers in two completely different parts of the world.

And, you know, I'm definitely grateful for what happened here. I mean, I spent the first, you know, almost 15 to 20 years, I really liked this type of fermentation, which is a little bit different than the ethanol fermentation. In order for me to have a career in that, I had to first move to Wichita and to St. Joseph, Missouri. And this is really the first and only opportunity right now for me to come back home, and I'm from outside of Tea, South Dakota. and extremely grateful for, you know, what was built here and allowed me to come back home. And I'm sure people that live here are grateful for an opportunity to not have to leave.

[Austin] I mean, somewhat ironically, we're kind of in a similar situation.

[Heidi] Except you didn't have to leave first.

[Austin] Yeah, I didn't have to leave first. I got it, I timed it out better.

[Heidi] I feel like there's nothing that South Dakota people love more than seeing their own people stay within the state. And places like Houdek is a reason why people can stay.

[Jeremy] And I get to appreciate the cold again. So yeah, I got nostalgic for the cold there for a few years, and I was nostalgic for the snow, so I'm still enjoying it again, so.

[Austin] I think it really is cool seeing how it's grown. Like I said, being in early during its development to where it is now, just the amount of people across the state that know what we're trying to accomplish or what we're doing, have an inkling as to what we're trying to do.

The amount of people that know about us has definitely increased quite a bit. So that's always been cool to see. It's always nice where people take a genuine interest in what you're doing or generally curious about what you're trying to accomplish.

[Jeremy] Yeah, I think the interesting thing that I've seen is just the flow of our state legislators and our U.S. representatives from South Dakota that come through and understand how the research and the commercialization and how we develop new and innovative ways to process what South Dakota farmers are doing and how that really adds value.

[Heidi] South Dakota is kind of in a unique position when it comes to bioprocessing because ag is our No. 1 industry. We produce such a large amount of raw product.

Like in 2024, USDA said that South Dakota produced 234 million bushels of soybeans alone. You know, obviously that's the product that you guys are working with. Why do you think South Dakota is so uniquely positioned to be successful in bioprocessing?

[Jeremy] When you think about a South Dakota farmer, I think you can create a good picture and understanding of a good steward of the land. Right. Having that bringing your raw ingredient into the process, I think, is an extremely important part of the puzzle is having that sustainability. And, you know, this is where soybeans should be grown. There's a lot of other reasons as well.

We talked a little bit about the ethanol industry. You know, each one of these facilities is about 100 jobs, right, to run these facilities and market the product and manage the people and maintain the equipment and things like that. And, you know, I sort of think about it as, you know, we did the ethanol industry. We put a certain set of tools out in these rural communities that turned into an economic engine, kind of revitalizing rural America. And within those within that tool set, we have a lot of commonality.

So, some of the equipment that we use, tanks, pumps, centrifuges, things of that nature. There's a limited set of products that can come out of that type of fermentation. And, you know, I believe that, you know, one of the unique things about what we're doing here is, you know, we're biotransforming soybeans with aerobic fermentation now instead of anaerobic. So, without air is how we make alcohol. With air is how we do what we do. And if we can bring this tool set and sort of mass deploy it in the U.S. and in rural areas, you know, again, we have the potential to add literally hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of economic value and drive into these rural communities and, you know, elevate the price of soybeans, just like we elevated the price of corn.

[Austin] If you think about it, like we talked a little bit earlier, each plant is 60,000 acres of soybeans, 55,000 tons of soybean meal. And then our output is 30,000 tons of ME-Pro, 22,500 tons of the carbohydrate stream. And we're also capturing some of the residual oil on the meal as well and selling that.

[Jeremy] And this is just the first plant, so, I mean, future replications of this technology will probably be multiples in size, just like ethanol plants started off as smaller plants, some were 5 million gallons on farm plants and things like that.

And, you know, now we see sites that are making over 400 million gallons a year, you know, and it's, you know, a multiple lane, you know, truck traffic of corn going in and DDGs going out 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

When you look at these facilities, when I look forward and I sort of see the vision for soybean processing, I see the same thing, right? I see these, you know, these facilities being replicated. I see us adding a lot of value to soybeans. And, you know, I think as we continue to develop new technology, I think we're going to shift that balance back and shift a little bit more money back into the farmer's product or into the farmer's pockets and those communities pockets as we, you know, continue to develop these circular concept types of things.

And that's why this tool set is so unique. We can generate more inputs for agriculture. We can generate more valuable inputs for animal feed and animal husbandry that can lead to better bottom line impacts for the farm. So, we do it all locally. With this tool set.

[Heidi] I know that this technology was created at SDSU, and as Houdek is looking to grow and expand outside of fish meal, fish products and into animal and human health, how has SDSU kind of continued to work with Houdek to kind of, you know, be a partner?

[Austin] SDSU has resources on campus here that we don't necessarily have access to ourselves. But in order to bridge that gap, we rely on the university to help us with some of our more sophisticated analytical measurements. We've worked with Dr. Peter Kovacs on some of the agronomic testing side with some new products as well. I'm in Dr. Bishnu Karki's lab who took over Bill's lab where Bill's lab is in Dairy Micro. So, I think SDSU and Houdek have always had a very collaborative relationship.

[Jeremy] And there's other examples of that, too, you know, the BNERC project. We're real grateful for SDSU to include us on that. And, you know, that's all about this sort of, you know, bringing better inputs back to agriculture, right. You know, bio-nitrogen. And we've been able to overlap that a little bit with our existing commercialization concept that we have in our in our soy bio-refinery right now. And I think that's been really powerful for us.

I mean, we've been able to do some things that we would not have been able to do without that partnership with SDSU and, you know, really grateful for that. And, you know, I'm really excited about what's to come here with the collaboration with SDSU and what we can do for agriculture and, you know, really drive value out of soy through these facilities in terms of animal feed and human food products and, you know, agronomic inputs, you know, and then figuring out how to stick those and all the neat little robots that they make over there that crawl through the fields or fly over the fields and how to best supply this stuff to the farmers. So last year's soybean crop can be part of next year's corn fertilizer or next year's soybean fertilizer or next year's meat harvest.

I mean, it's, you know, there's just a lot of really cool things that we can do. Again, when you get a group of people together and everybody's excited about a common goal, I mean, there's really, you know, there's no limit to what you can do.

[Heidi] You talk about people looking for a common goal, you know, being excited about the same thing, right? And I feel like I saw that a lot while touring the Back 40, your guys' facility, and a lot of those people are SDSU alumni. How does SDSU kind of prepare students to work at a place like Houdek? How do they prepare them to be successful in bioprocessing?

[Jeremy] I can speak from my experience, and I was also, I was Bill's first Ph.D. student, you know, a long time ago. So, I also came out of Bill's lab. And I thought the flexibility in being a grad student here and having these opportunities locally like going out and working in molecular biology at Midwest Seeds, and the ethanol plant came up and, you know, for the most part felt very supported in going out and getting that experience and making that connection with the local industry. And I mean, that was just as important, you know, working with the local industry ,and then pulling SDSU students in was just as important part of my education as, you know, going to school on campus.

[Austin] I think SDSU has a lot of bioprocessing expertise in equipment as well, even just in the Dairy Micro building, the Shared Equipment Lab, the bioflows there. They're probably the same bioflows you worked with and I worked with. I mean, that is a good tool to teach students, though, how stirred tank aerobic fermentation works. I mean, it's a kind of a model tool to teach kids how it works.

[Heidi] Well, let's talk about that a little bit. You are a master's student right now. You're set to graduate in 2026. How have you kind of continued to learn to, in turn, make Houdek better?

[Austin] First of all, I'm just really grateful for the opportunity on the Houdek side to help me pursue that venture. And then on the university side, Bishnu being welcoming to me to pursue that as well. I think it's obviously a nontraditional path, right? I graduated with my undergrad in 2015, and I didn't go back until '22.

[Heidi] So for context, what did you graduate with for your bachelor's?

[Austin] I graduated with microbiology and biotechnology in 2015 from SDSU.

[Heidi] And now you're working full time, getting your master's in biological sciences.

[Austin] At the time, I had thought about pursuing my master's degree. There was a space there where I didn't really know what I was going to do in that time. But then Dennis Harstad, our former GM, offered me a job. I was like, “Well, I'll take that.” So, I started working. And then I just think the relationships, the mentors I've had at Prairie Aquatech and now Houdek over the years have helped me a lot, prepared me a lot for graduate school. And my project, valorizing our carbohydrate stream more, is a really cool project as well.
So, I think unlike a lot of other master's projects, there's an industry component to mine. Like the actual monetary implication to valorize one of our co-product streams differentiates me a little bit.

[Jeremy] And that not to, yeah, we gotta be careful not to, you know, it's great that we were able to, you know, birth these ideas that are already partially into commercialization. But I also think it's really important to understand, you know, research is a bit like baseball, right? You know, you got to go to the plate and take three or four swings before you get a hit. But if you don't go to the plate and take those swings, you're never going to get a hit. So, you know, it's extremely important both for, you know, very close to commercial applied research, you know, that has a very high likelihood of being commercialized, but it's also equally as important and maybe even more important, you know, at the big end of the funnel.

[Austin] So to put that in perspective, the first couple bioflow trials I tried doing this, nothing grew. It didn't work. The organism didn't, it didn't grow at all, right? I mean, there's just, you'd have to solve problems, right? I mean, that's a lot of what industry and grad school prepares you for, right? It's, here's a problem, go fix it.

[Heidi] Kind of going back to talking about how your master's work is kind of contributing to Houdek, you're doing your thesis on Houdek work. Kind of to Jeremy's point earlier, it takes, it's an acquired skill to be able to do a lot with a little, right? You know, use all of the product. So, part of your master's project, you're taking the leftover liquid from the ME-Pro production process, and it's concentrated into a syrup.

[Austin] A syrup.

[Jeremy] Our lowest, it's our lowest value product today.

[Austin] Correct.

[Heidi] But you're looking to make it a high-value one.

[Austin] Yes, absolutely.

[Heidi] Because you're researching how you can ferment it and create prebiotic sugars. So like prebiotics, they can be used in animal health, human health. You can find them in a lot of different things that we consume. I know one thing we noticed was our son's baby formula. And they charge a lot more for that.

[Jeremy] And they can also be used in plant health.

[Heidi] Yeah.

[Jeremy] And it's, you know, the prebiotic compounds that sort of feed the good bacteria, whether it's in our bodies or in the soil or whatever. And then also postbiotics as well, which are parts of the, what the fermenting organisms make that add health benefits to the animals that consume them. So, the prebiotics and the postbiotics are both important part of that.

[Heidi] Something that all came from one research idea, right? And it's one thing I don't think that people realize, like how important research and development is to driving industry and new technology and new products and.

[Jeremy] There's never a zero-sum day, right? You're, you're either trying new things and taking calculated risks and moving forward, or you're getting left behind. You do not stay, you know, where you're at. You know, that's important. That's why it's important to build the right team and get out of bed every day. Because again, these things are challenging. You know, we don't do easy things and …

[Austin] … no one likes being complacent either. You shouldn't just be satisfied with where you're at.

[Heidi] Let's talk about other upcoming innovations at Houdek. I know Austin's starting to work on some things, but there's one product that's about to launch called “Protéger.” Can you tell me about that?

[Jeremy] When you think about your pet, it's like, I want my pet to feel good. I want my pet to be active. I want my pet's coat to be shiny.

[Heidi] People care about their animals.

[Jeremy] I don't want my pet to get cancer and get ill. And the nice thing about Protéger is, you know, No. 1, it provides that, you know, base nutrition that every living thing needs to survive, you know, a high-quality protein ingredient that goes in.

And then through the fermentation process, it also contains all these interesting pre and post biotics that, you know, help the animal live in a healthy way. You know, there's compounds that come in with soybeans that our fermentation actually converts, they're called isoflavones, and they help, you know, dogs in particular maintain healthy weight.

You know, I've got a chocolate lab named Louise at home that I'm extremely excited to get some Protéger dog food and see if it can help her to get back to a good healthy weight.

So, I think it's just, you know, again, it's nothing's easy here. And, you know, right now we're trying to get that product out internationally. And we're working on getting the FDA approvals in the U.S., which hopefully will be coming soon here. Like some of the real interesting stuff that we've been able to demonstrate is, you know, we can reduce the stress level in an animal.

[Austin] So just to clarify for the audience, fish don't stress eat. When fish are stressed, they don't eat. They're not, yes, they're not stress eaters.

[Jeremy] Yeah.

[Heidi] Interesting.

[Jeremy] So having stressed out fish can lead to, you know, reduced efficiencies and feed conversion to meat and mortalities and things like that. So, it has a negative impact on the economics of, you know, making the salmon fillet that shows up in the, you know, the meat case at the grocery store.

[Heidi] You guys have spent a better part of your lives dedicated to research. What is one thing you wish more people understood about research and its impact on everyday life?

[Austin] I think just going back to the baseball analogy, I mean, if you're batting 300, I mean, you're doing really, if you're batting 30%, you're doing really well. The number of bioflow and flask trials I had to run before we actually got to the 150-liter trial that produced the feed that we produced, you know, the feed that the feed that we tried in tilapia and saw the good results in tilapia.

And I mean, there was a number of failures and trial and error that went into that. Um, the other component, I mean, time's a component too, right? I mean, these things, time and money, these things take time and money to figure out.

[Jeremy] And, you know, and time and money when it comes to, again, I just sort of draw the line here between what, what part does academic research play and what part does industrial applied research really play in this here? A lot of things over the past few years about people worrying about money being misspent and why are we spending money on that research when it doesn't come to fruition?

And I mean, there's a number of reasons because if there's too much risk and the financial reward isn't clear enough, you're not going to draw private funds, uh, to fund that research.

If we don't fund the, if we don't fund the research search up to a point where it's de-risked and we can find a commercial entity that's willing to carry it forward and commercialize it, you know, that's that whole situation where you're moving forward or you're moving backward. And, you know, if you don't fund that stuff, you're moving backward.

[Austin] And I can even tie that into our story, right? I mean, think of how many years it was spent in Bill's lab before, and Dr. Brown spent a number of years on campus before it was actually able to even be piloted.

[Jeremy] Without that funding, without the five things that failed for this one thing that was successful, if those research dollars and things wouldn't have flowed in, we wouldn't see this innovation. We wouldn't see the dry grind corn ethanol industry from the funding that came in the 70s into SDSU.

And I think that's extremely important to understand because when you're doing things right and you don't mess up, right, you still have this sort of batting average of things that are successful. But it's just as important for all the students that come through universities to have access to that funding and that experience of research so they can, you know, screw a few things up and learn, right, to bring our whole workforce forward.

[Austin] And I think public relations opportunities like this, highlighting success stories out of universities, I mean, Medgene's another one.

[Jeremy] If we cut that funding off for that innovation, again, you're moving forward or you're going backward. I don't think we want to go backward. You know, is there a better way to continue to do this? There's always a better way to continue to do this. How you get to the better way is you do it with a continuous improvement mindset in place and you get the right group of people together to move forward, and you continue to make those improvements. You don't stop.

[Heidi] Thank you both for being here today to speak about Houdek and the bioprocessing industry and about research, how it matters. And it starts right here at SDSU. This is "The Yellow & Blue Podcast." See you next time.