Charlestown-based Indigo today announced the launch of a platform designed to test and accelerate the adoption of new technologies in agriculture.
The agriculture startup, which BostInno included in its list of 17 top Boston tech companies to watch in 2017, is taking the next step in using machine learning to make farm crops more sustainable thanks to Indigo PartnersTM.
The initiative involves a national network of 25 growers and agronomic experts on over 15,000 acres nationwide. Throughout the growing season, growers and experts are going to perform a series of agricultural tests, collect and then evaluate the data thanks to a computational platform. Agricultural technologies to be put to the test will be, among others, Indigo's microbial seed treatments.
"We partner with these growers to literally test new technologies," said President, CEO, and Director of Indigo David Perry in an interview with BostInno. "We might be planting seeds, we might be testing microbes and how they impact those seeds in yields. And then we gather that data both through automated fashion, things like weather and satellite images, but we also have to be on the ground to collect some of those data. Think of soil samples, for example. We think that [the combination of physical data gathering and automated data gathering] is necessary to success."
The 25 were selected among the largest and most respected growers by taking into account geographical diversity and crop diversity, Perry added.
At the end of the growing season, growers and experts will attend an annual Indigo-hosted event to discuss their insights. The company hasn't set a date for the event yet.
Thanks to the partnership with growers, Indigo hopes to speed the pace of technology evaluations and discoveries in agriculture.
In layman's terms, Indigo's broad mission is discovering what beneficial microbes that are meant to be inside the plants and have been reduced or eliminated by pesticides. By adding them back, plants can be healthier and more resistant to diseases. To accomplish this goal, scientists take thousands of plant samples and isolate tens of thousands of microbes. Then, they sequence the DNA of all those microbes and use machine learning algorithms to predict which microbes may work inside the plants.
"We're still a startup, but a slightly more mature one," Perry said. Last summer, Indigo raised a $100 million Series C round led by the Alaska Permanent Fund to expand research and development, hire more employees and scale commercial operations. In addition to the company's products, Indigo Cotton and Indigo Wheat, Perry added that the company will have three more products this year, including corn, soy, and rice.
In future years, Indigo plans to launch the IndigoPartnersTM program globally to assess a broad range of products and new technologies sourced from Indigo and other agriculture innovators, the company wrote in a press release.
