Indigo Ag Acquires TellusLabs to Improve Data Insights

At Indigo Ag’s Charlestown headquarters, technicians track plant growth,…
Photograph by Jim Harrison

Indigo Ag, a company helping farmers sustainably feed the planet, acquired TellusLabs, a company using satellite imaging for developing agricultural insights. Indigo adds TellusLabs’ proprietary platform and staff of experts to help reduce risk and increase yield potential for growers. With this technology and personnel, Indigo aims to expand the scope and precision of its data insights and recommendation platform. These insights will bring transparency to the global food system while supporting grower profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health.

TellusLabs has built a living map of the world’s food supply, tracing farm management decisions and agronomic parameters in real time, including field boundaries, crop type, planting and harvest dates, and overall crop performance. When paired with proprietary machine learning, the platform can infer the environmental impact of farming practices from space. Combining these insights with weather and other historical data, along with predictive algorithms, TellusLabs built their flagship product, Kernel, to gather insights on the global food system. This product, capable of monitoring crop progress daily and forecasting crop yields prior to harvest across the globe, will be leveraged by Indigo to enable data-based decision-making for growers and buyers throughout the season.

According to the release, Indigo’s microbial products have been shown to increase the drought resistance, nutrient use efficiency, and yield of crops. Understanding the grower’s yield potential and unique land characteristics with TellusLabs’ spatial insights will help allow Indigo agronomists to make recommendations to improve overall crop yield and quality throughout the season.