Matija Kopić combined his love of agriculture and IT to create an international business.
Matija Kopić, a young man from Viljevo, a village near Donji Miholjac was the subject of the Story of the Day, published by Deutsche Welle on March 25, 2016. He is a man dressed like every other member of his generation, cool calm and collected in his speech and the one thing that sets him apart from the crowd is the fact that he runs a business generating several million Euros a year and employs 45 people out of which a dozen is employed in the US. He never sought better opportunities outside Croatia, instead, he had an idea and was determined to make it work.
Matija owns Farmeron, a company he started back in 2011 which now takes “care” of over a million cows in the United States alone. He’s very passionate about cows and would rather talk about them than money. He describes himself as a “kid that came from the farm and hopes to go back to the farm one day”. “I think we misconstrued the meaning of success because this word can mean many different things to different people. But our society is wired that way so I am guessing it is now considered normal for everyone to run in the same direction. I believe we all have this one creation somewhere inside of us and a calling to create something and if we care to exploit that calling, I think we can awaken that entrepreneurial spirit, and I don’t mean entrepreneurship in the classical sense“, Kopić describes his “philosophy”.
As he says, the roots of his success go back to his childhood when he was given a task to look after a small flock of sheep. His family had a small cheese making business. While he was in high school he fell in love with agricultural production and IT. The combination of these two things that don’t seem to have many common links ended up being the right path towards a successful business.
Farmeron is aimed at the end user – big cow and milk producing farms. These are all large corporate systems, farms with 5 to 10 thousand animals on average. His company sells smart solutions and management access that enable users to solve concrete problems that occur on farms. Technology enables us to change the mindset and improve resource management on farms achieving highest possible optimization with lower costs and an increase in production. But, profit is not the only thing important to Farmeron, since their operating and management principles have three main postulates; ecology, sustainable resources and ethical treatment of animals. They insist on these three things, and even though it is commonly believed they do not go well with high profitability, Farmeron has proven the opposite.
„There are many motives to keep going from peer recognition, money, self-achievement but it the end there is always that wish to help the producer in this very turbulent time for agriculture where we all have to produce more but in a much smarter way, using less resources while still applying some laws of nature and, in my belief, laws of God that teach us to treat each other, the land and animals responsibly for the sake of future generations “, young Matija Kopić says about the reasons he keeps pushing forward.
Complex nature of Farmeron’s business requires skills and know-how that goes above and beyond just programming so the company now employs people that used to manage some of the largest farms in Europe, animal nutrition doctors etc. But, even with such high level of skill, the average age of their employees is around 30. Kopić says that there is a family atmosphere in his company and once someone comes in, they usually stay which tells us all a lot about the working conditions in Farmeron.
„We are not focusing on Europe at all, we have decided to work with the largest and most complex systems in the world” Kopić says, and he explains their decision to conquer the US first with a very simple logic that standards which are adopted by the largest systems will soon find their way to medium and small producers once they see the efficiency of the system.
Despite their success, Farmeron people are not standing still and they are currently overseeing several pilot programs in China which is a giant market that is constantly rising: “We see a lot of room on that market and the potential for cooperation” founder of Farmeron adds.
Average Croatian business owner mostly expects the government to do something and create a “business framework”. Matija Kopić says he never expected anything from the government but he does expect it to stay out of his business as much as possible “I am so far away from the average Croatian business environment that it is hard for me to answer that question. Since we work with US companies I was never really involved in all these stories about the government’s efforts to help or distract us. We used some employment incentives when we were hiring young people and we were exempt from paying some fees for a while for which I am grateful. I don’t expect anything else from the State. I don’t think it0s obliged to do something for me. If I dwelled on that subject and those kinds of frustrations too long, it would have eaten up a lot of my creative energy” Kopić says.
He is more interested in investors that were following him from the start. Some of them are investors in the classic sense, some came from agriculture and they recognized his product as a necessity, some are interested in the bottom line and some are interested in the advancement of technology and production. The largest forage producer in the United States invested in Farmeron because he recognized the value of their product.
The company advanced because of the value of their idea and it started when Matija and his friend Marko Dukmenić started writing a code and were joined by Ana Herman. The company was registered in 2011 and the opened their US branch in 2012. Matija has come a long way since then but he doesn’t have any grand plans yet. He doesn’t know what he will be doing in his 40s and 50s “I’m not the guy who makes big plans. I don’t even like business planning; I have people to do that for me. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan ahead and that planning is not important in business. I love by a simple philosophy that you should seize each day. My future is wide open and I don’t want to close myself into any frames” Matija concludes.
