Indigo Ag, Inc., Boston, Mass., acquired TellusLabs, a Cambridge, Mass.-based provider of satellite imaging for developing agricultural insights. Indigo adds TellusLabs’ proprietary platform and staff of experts to reduce risk and increase yield potential for growers. With this technology and personnel, Indigo will 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 built a living map of the world’s food supply, tracing farm management decisions and agronomic parameters, including field boundaries, crop type, planting and harvest dates and overall crop performance, in real time. When paired with proprietary machine learning, the platform can infer the environmental impact of farming practices from space. Combining these insights with weather, historical data and predictive algorithms, TellusLabs built 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 to enable data-based decision-making for growers and buyers throughout the season.

“At Indigo, we are always looking to expand and improve our offering to growers,” says David Perry, chief executive officer of Indigo. “TellusLabs’ technology will bolster our effort to produce rigorous and useful agronomic recommendations tailored to each acre of a farm. And, the team behind the technology is fundamentally aligned to our mission.”

“We imagine the combination of satellite data and machine learning providing a spectrum of insights to growers — from the past, in the present and for the future of their farms,” says Geoffrey von Maltzahn, co-founder and CIO of Indigo. “Understanding each field on its own terms, identifying the features that make them unique and predicting the best products and growing practices for every acre of land are tricky, nebulous agricultural questions. With Indigo’s acquisition of Tellus, a farmer looking to grow his or her best crop can receive personalized data and recommendations that change the course of a growing season for the better.”

TellusLabs’ partnership with Indigo was established through Indigo Research Partners, a program designed to evaluate agricultural technologies to support growers with real-time, farm-specific insights. One significant collaboration included the analysis of over 40,000 acres of land to determine yield and quality improvements for the 2018 Indigo Wheat harvest. The team will integrate as Indigo’s geospatial innovation unit.

“Joining Indigo will allow us to strengthen and expand the scope of the agricultural intelligence platform we have spent years building, while making a significant impact with constellations of satellites orbiting our planet,” adds David Potere, co-founder and CEO of TellusLabs. “After working with Indigo for the past year, it’s clear to me that their team is uniquely positioned to harness that platform for the benefit of growers, buyers and consumers around the world. We look forward to integrating our satellite imagery and machine learning technologies with Indigo’s deep agronomic expertise and their fast-growing, farm-scale databases to help farmers sustainably feed the planet.”