July 6, 2022

This paid piece is sponsored by South Dakota Biotech.

Mark Stowers’ career has taken him across the globe, through South Dakota and back again.

The C-suite adviser in agriculture, bioproducts and bioenergy has worked across five continents and now is based in Sioux Falls, where he is also a member of the board of directors for South Dakota Biotech, helping guide the industry’s growth statewide.

“Mark is such an asset to South Dakota, and we need to connect him with other established businesses as well as entrepreneurs,” said Joni Ekstrum, executive director of South Dakota Biotech. “His career is impressive, fascinating and incredibly valuable to other businesses looking to grow on the ag and energy side of the bioscience industry.”

Stowers, a Houston native, first came to Sioux Falls in the mid-2000s as the senior vice president of science and technology at POET. He’s now the founder of The Global Bluefish Co., a company he formed to focus on de-risking agricultural, food and chemicals businesses globally.

We sat down with him to learn more about his background and the future he envisions for biotech in South Dakota.

What led you down your career path in the first place?

I would say it’s accidental. I’m a microbiologist by training. The early microbes I worked on worked in association with plants to make them grow better and faster, and that led me into doing work in forestry and then field crops, vegetable crops and lots of things in between.

How did you originally become connected to POET and South Dakota?

I was running a nonprofit research institute on the Michigan State University campus focused on biofuels, and we had a project with Heartland Grain Fuel in Aberdeen. I started to become familiar with South Dakota, and Jeff Broin was pulling together the Broin companies to form POET, and everything aligned for me to come do what I was doing in Michigan but do it for POET in Sioux Falls.

What made you ultimately leave Sioux Falls for a time?

In 2011, I got a call from a friend who was CEO of a vegetable seed company based in France. I’d worked with vegetable seed most of the 1990s, and he asked if I’d come solve a problem and serve as head of research and development. So I went first to California and then to France for four or five years and set up an R&D program. Ultimately, we ended up having 28 locations in 16 time zones, so it was quite adventure.

I came back to South Dakota in 2016 and continued with the company for a year or so and then was approached by a venture capital firm in Boston, so in 2017 I went to start an ag biotech gene editing company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and did that until December of 2020 and then came back to Sioux Falls.

What does your work involve now?

When I came back to South Dakota, I formed a company to help C-suite executives in the ag, energy and food space – helping with startup questions and succession planning, especially in family businesses. I now serve as an interim COO for a company in California helping them develop a purple tomato, so I do a lot of things — mostly help companies, both established ones and startups.

A purple tomato? We need to know more.

Yes, the company is called Norfolk Plant Sciences, and it actually was just featured in The Wall Street Journal. The purple tomato has the antioxidants of blueberries and blackberries. They have other varieties that offer additional vitamin D and resveratrol.

Side note: We like your company name, The Global Bluefish Company.

I love fishing, and the bluefish are open-water fish – very fast, very agile, in every part of the ocean around the world. So I kind of feel like a bluefish.

What keeps you in South Dakota at this stage of your career?

My wife and I really like the area. We like the people. And it’s a great location for us. It has everything we’d want, plus the ability to travel anywhere. And from a business standpoint, linking up with South Dakota Biotech, I see how the state has so much potential with the universities and technology bases being established both in life sciences and in ag. It’s just a really exciting place to be with a lot of growth opportunity.

As you’ve started to serve on the South Dakota Biotech board, what possibilities do you see for evolving the industry in the state?

A lot of times when people think about biotech, they think about life sciences and the pharmaceutical industry, but there’s a lot going on in biofuels or industrial chemical space with POET and the new Bioproducts Institute at SDSU and the whole ag space. Most of the products of seeds that growers here in the state with corn and soybeans all use biotechnology, and that technology continues to evolve. So I think we’re in a place where we can bring all that together and not look at silos in biotechnology.

Have you started to work with any startups in South Dakota yet?

Honestly, no, but here’s what’s key to know. I got my Ph.D. at North Carolina State where the Research Triangle is a hotbed for biotech startups. And that started in the 1950s, and here we are 60 years later, and it’s at maturity. So it takes time to build. And I think that’s where we are. We have the opportunity to build that and shape it in a way that makes it competitive. One thing I really like is interfacing data science, data analytics and software engineering with biotech because at the end of the day biotech is all about information. If we can understand that better, there’s really opportunity.

How can people connect with you?

Find me here on LinkedIn, or reach out to South Dakota Biotech at [email protected].