Iowa Farm Family Engineers Successful Venture

As it has turned out, the easy part is the idea. The hard part has been everything else since the Applegate family first started to show off their product, Mixmate, a portable, automated, chemical-mixing and recordkeeping system.

For many farmers, the inclination to tinker with equipment or engineer crafty solutions to persistent problems is as natural a part of the job and lifestyle as blue jeans and weather-watching. Doug Applegate, who farms in Oakland, Iowa, is that to the extreme.

He, alongside his wife, Kathy, and two ag engineer sons, Brent and Luke, built a company -- Praxidyn -- to manufacture and market the chemical-mixing system Mixmate. They are still working their way through all that entails.

What does it take to turn a tractor-cab idea into a real-world business? The most important ingredient, the Applegates agree, is patience.

They first pieced together the Mixmate prototype more than 15 years ago in their farm shop during the slow days of one cold southwest Iowa winter and presented the prototype at a farm show in 2011.

That they didn't sell a machine for five more years is a testament to how difficult the journey from tractor-cab-idea to marketable product can be.

"The difference between a prototype and a production machine, there is hundreds of times more engineering that goes into the production machine," Doug explains. "We didn't realize how big of a job that would be."

When it came time to dig into the circuitry and coding, things got more complicated.

"One of the biggest things was the development of the circuit boards and code," Brent continues. "Google can be really good at finding stuff, but there were a lot of times I tried to Google a question, and it came back with zero results."

In addition, developing the software, so central to the automation and recordkeeping that Praxidyn touts as what helps set its machine apart, is never-ending.

The company completely overhauled its software, mobile app and cloud service in the last several years and still must update it constantly.

The company is focused on adding compatibility with John Deere Operations Center and recently added Portuguese as a language option. Spanish may be next.

The company, which charges between $30,000 and about $42,000 for its two customizable Mixmate options, depending on exactly what's included, will likely start charging an annual subscription fee for its software because of the costs for software development and updates.

For an in-cab engineer such as Doug, inventing has always been an interest. His first foray into entrepreneurship came in the 1970s, when he developed a gadget to safely empty chemicals from 5-gallon cans. He and Kathy were just dating at the time, and she got a big taste of what was to come as they visited patent attorneys and set up booths at farm shows.

Chemical companies switching from metal to plastic containers spelled the end of that effort. When the family's two sons came along, the Applegates' inventiveness only escalated.

Brent and Luke were constantly tooling around on farm equipment and entered many successful engineering projects into 4-H and FFA competitions. They ultimately both earned ag engineering degrees from Iowa State University before coming back home to help on the farm and in launching Mixmate.

Now, Luke tackles more of the farming, while Brent helps lead the engineering and software development from the Praxidyn facility in Avoca, Iowa. Doug and Kathy, meanwhile, serve, among many roles, as the face of the company, hauling Mixmate to farm-equipment shows across the country.

At this point, there are hundreds of Mixmate machines in use, but Doug still thinks of himself as a farmer first. "If I wasn't a farmer, I think I'd have been an engineer," he says.

"He is an engineer," Kathy says, "even if he doesn't have that diploma on the wall."

**

-- Follow Joel on social platform X @JReichPF

[PF_1125]

(c) Copyright 2025 DTN, LLC. All rights reserved.