His Thesis Lived in the Soil. Now It Feeds Ethiopia's Farms

As a university student, Samson Alemu Fentaye did an internship at a research institute in Ethiopia. There he met farmers whose fields were giving less every year.

The fix he went after is too small to see. It lives in the soil.

A thesis that became a company

In 2019 Samson and fellow students began research for their graduation thesis. They gathered soil and plant samples from Amhara, Oromia and southern Ethiopia and went looking for bacteria that help crops grow.

Finding them was the first step. Making them tough enough for Ethiopian farms was the hard part. Many fields there are acidic, so the team worked on the microbes in the lab, adapting them to survive acidity and to stay in the soil, then tested them in greenhouses and on real fields.

In 2022 they registered the company: Thur Biotech, with Samson, a biotechnologist, as co-founder and chief executive.

What Thur Biotech makes

Thur Biotech makes biofertilisers and biocontrol products. They are living products: beneficial microbes that farmers apply to seed or spray on leaves.

Their home is the root zone. From there they feed the plant in two ways: by making nitrogen, phosphorus and zinc easier for it to take in, and by freeing up nutrients the soil already holds. The company has nine products on sale, each made for particular crops and growing zones, from cereals and pulses to vegetables and coffee. A dedicated coffee product and a treatment against aflatoxin, a poison made by moulds on stored crops, are listed on its website as upcoming.

For a buyer, that means a farm input developed from Ethiopian soil for Ethiopian conditions, which can cut down how much chemical fertiliser a farm needs.

From the lab to the farm

Farmers were not going to take a new kind of fertiliser on trust. So Thur Biotech showed them. It has trained more than 1,600 farmers and run over 74 demonstrations, working with Ethiopia's Ministry of Agriculture and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research.

Money for growth came from competitions and grants. In 2023 Samson won 10,000 dollars in the AYuTe Africa Challenge in Ethiopia, which had close to 1,000 applicants, and the company won again at regional level in 2024. The 2023 prize money went straight into production: rented equipment, more people and bigger batches.

Sales followed: from 3 tons in 2022 to 94.5 tons in 2025. By Heifer International's count, the products have reached more than 56,000 smallholder farmers. The company works in five regions, where 96 local agro-dealers sell them. Farmers report yield gains of 15 to 30% and about 280 dollars more income a year on average.

Samson sums up the change in one line. "We moved from proving that biofertilizers work to proving that they can scale," he says.

In the spotlight

In August 2026 Samson was named one of the ten finalists of Africa's Business Heroes. The winners will be chosen in Kigali in December.

How to buy

Thur Biotech sells through agro-dealers and cooperatives in Ethiopia, and its website has an online shop.

• Website: thurbiotech.com

What's next

The next step is a production plant in Sheger City, near Addis Ababa, designed to make 300 tons a year. After that, Samson wants to sell across East Africa, and the team keeps working on making its microbes last longer on the shelf and cope with a changing climate.

He also wants to change who farms. Too many people, he says, still think agriculture is not for the young. Thur Biotech, started by students, is his answer.

Key Takeaways

Thur Biotech shows how lab science can reach smallholders when it is proven where they farm.

• Solve the local problem first. Breeding microbes to survive acidic Ethiopian soils is what made the products work in the fields that needed them.
• Show, then sell. Demonstration plots and farmer training came before sales, and sales rose more than thirtyfold in three years.