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A Designer Seed
Company Is Building a
Farming Panopticon

Indigo Ag believes that aerial imagery of fields, like

the ones in Colorado shown here, will help farmers
increase their crop yields.
Indigo Ag

When Geoffrey von Maltzahn was first

pitching farmers to try out his startupʼs
special seeds, he sometimes told them,
half-acknowledging his own hyperbole,
that “if weʼre right, you shouldnʼt just see
results in the field, you should be able to
see them from outer space.” As the co-
founder of a company called Indigo Ag,
von Maltzahn was hawking a probiotic
that he hoped would increase their crop
yields dramatically. “I never thought weʼd
ever actually test that idea,” he says.

In the three years since Indigo began

selling naturally occurring organisms
such as bacteria and fungi, spray-coated
onto seeds, the company has grown to
become perhaps the most valuable
agtech company in the world. Pitchbook,
for example, estimates Indigoʼs value at
$3.5 billion. These microbes are already
helping crops grow in low-water
conditions, and one day they could
replace the chemical fertilizers that
modern agriculture relies on. This fall,
Indigo expanded well beyond seeds into
logistics by opening an online
marketplace—what it calls a “farmersʼ
eBay”—to match up agricultural buyers
and sellers.

And now it is branching into geospatial

intelligence. On Thursday, Indigo Ag
bought one of the most intriguing
startups using machine learning to make
use of publicly available satellite imagery:
a two-year old company called
TellusLabs.

Indigoʼs experimentation with geospatial

data began about a year and a half ago,
when von Maltzahn came across the work
of Anne Carpenter, a cell biologist at the
Broad Institute, located down the road
from Indigoʼs Boston offices. She had
developed deep learning algorithms to
recognize patterns of disease in human
cells, just by looking at videos filmed
under the microscope.

Von Maltzahn wondered if there was an

agricultural analog, not under the lens of
a microscope but from a camera zooming
by at 10,000 miles an hour, attached to a
satellite orbiting Earth from space. “That
was the wild idea that led us to this,” says
von Maltzahn. “I certainly had no idea
when we started that one day weʼd be
acquiring a satellite company to bring it
into operations in a much bigger way.”

Indigo Ag

Tellusʼs chief product is Kernel, a

forecasting tool that combines satellite
images with weather reports and crop
data from the US Department of
Agriculture to predict how much food
different countries are on track to grow
each season. In 2017, it predicted the US
corn crop yield with greater than 99
percent accuracy, months before the US
Department of Agriculture arrived at the
same conclusion. Indigo thinks the
startupʼs AI will help more farmers grow
more food while putting less strain on the
environment.

The company already offers advice from

trained agronomists to all its growers,
based on the data those farmers provide.
If Indigoʼs agronomists could watch those
same fields every day from space and
know how much water was in them, how
fast plants were converting sunlight into
corn, or how much protein was
developing inside each wheat kernel, they
might be able to provide more
personalized, precise feedback. Instead
of watering every field, or giving every
row a fertilizer boost, growers could tailor
treatments. Theyʼd save some money.
Theyʼd use less water and fewer
chemicals in the process. And maybe,
buyers with a mandate to lower their
carbon footprints, like Walmart and Tyson
Foods, would even pay a premium.

With Tellusʼs technology, Indigo is close

to being able to look at any cultivated
field on the planet and know what crop is
growing there, when it was planted, what
kind of soil itʼs growing in, how well itʼs
growing, what the protein content is,
what the yields will be, and when harvest
time will be. Along with this view from
space, the company hopes to add
drones, weather stations, and sensor-
equipped storage containers to,
eventually, turn the whole world into one
massive agricultural laboratory. “Most
agricultural research is done in small field
trials that donʼt do a good job of
mimicking reality,” says David Perry,
Indigoʼs CEO. “Now we can look at crop
performance across tens of thousands of
acres all at once.”

That could mean comparing different

planting times, or crop rotations, or
chemical treatments. Or, if youʼre in the
business of convincing farmers that plant
probiotics are a worthwhile investment,
comparing your seeds to the likes of
Bayer and Dow Dupont. Thatʼs what the
two companies set out to do when they
first teamed up a year ago: assess how
40,000 acres of Indigo red wheat growing
in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas
compared with neighboring fields lacking
a bacterial boost. Using a combination of
satellite imagery and data from the fields
themselves, they estimated a 12.7
percent bump for Indigo growers.

For now, Indigo is sharing little about how

exactly the satellite data will work its way
into the companyʼs line of products and
services. But last summerʼs wheat project
offers some clues. Using publicly
available data, Tellus has been able to
provide crop predictions at the county
level. But thatʼs not enough to help out
individual fields. Getting the resolution
down to something useful required more
granular data. Thatʼs exactly what Indigo
has spent the last three years amassing.

Since 2014, Indigo has recruited more

than 100 large-scale farmers to test its
microbiome-manipulating seeds—in
cotton, wheat, corn, soy, and rice. Those
farmers have each committed 500 acres
of their land to getting sensored-up for
Indigoʼs research and development
program. The company now passively
harvests more than a trillion data points
every day. But even that is just a small
piece of the puzzle. Growers in the
program collectively farm over 1 million
acres. All the information they gather on
those acres—planting dates, chemical
applications, cover crops in rotation—all
that goes to Indigo too.

By feeding data from Indigoʼs million-acre

global grower network into Tellusʼs
algorithms, Indigo plans to tune its new
agronomic intelligence apparatus down to
individual fields. The idea is to bring the
results it saw in a few wheat fields in the
heart of Americaʼs bread basket to every
acre of tillable soil.

“Weʼve been building a symbolic layer for

agriculture for the whole planet,” says
David Potere, co-founder and CEO of
Tellus, who will join the new geospatial
intelligence unit within Indigo. “Now weʼre
taking that living map and moving it
toward virtual field trial capabilities.”
When the whole world is your lab, it helps
to have a good view from above.

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