A Designer Seed Company Is Building a Farming Panopticon

When Geoffrey von Maltzahn was first pitching farmers to try out his startup’s special seeds, he sometimes told them, half-acknowledging his own hyperbole, that “if we’re right, you shouldn’t 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 we’d 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 Indigo’s 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 “farmers’ 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. Tellus’s 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 startup’s AI will help more farmers grow more food while putting less strain on the environment...MORE