TerViva continues feeding the world’s protein needs, will expand to Australia and India in 2019
“It was the showcase. The one and only.” That’s how Naveen Sikka, TerViva CEO, describes his perspective at his first Ag Showcase. To this day, he says, Ag Showcase remains the place that a company wants to announce itself. “It’s where you come out to the Ag community,” he says, “when you’re on the cusp of great things.” To put it modestly, that’s exactly where TerViva was when they first arrived on the Ag Showcase scene, just four years ago – and they’ve been skyrocketing ever since.
TerViva is a crop-focused company that grows pongamia, a high-yielding oilseed tree crop that requires low inputs of water and chemicals while producing high levels of oil and protein, delivering an environmentally friendly and economically viable “crop/drop”. With the availability of arable land around the globe rapidly declining, it seems likely that pongamia will provide a viable solution to this crisis, as well as a number of other environmental crises, in the sub-tropical and tropical climates to which the tree is well adapted.
TerViva is well on its way to proving this success. When the company first appeared on the Ag Showcase stage in 2014, they had planted approximately 30 acres of pongamia crop in the United States; that number has now grown to 1,500 acres in 2018. Delivering a new sustainable crop is no easy feat – as Sikka says, it’s not something people “pull off” frequently. But pull it off TerViva’s team has– whereas once pongamia was considered an inedible oil seed, TerViva’s success has proven that it can be made edible, and the company is poised to redefine the organic livestock feed market in the United States.
A huge driving force behind the rapid progress that TerViva has achieved is evident on the product side of their business. The company is actively developing scalable production operations to meet the anticipated demand from growers for large numbers of trees, sufficient numbers to make a significant contribution to filling the world’s growing protein needs. Naveen and his team are strategically connecting farmers to profitable markets in a way that is sustainable. Their expansion will continue worldwide – in the next year, TerViva has plans to open new offices in Australia and India, huge areas for pongamia research and development, bringing them one step closer to feeding the world’s protein needs.
📅 2013
👤 Naveen Sikka
💼 TerViva, Inc.
📍 Oakland, California
