Indigo Ag's natural seed-coating technology helps plants thrive

Indigo Agriculture, a tech startup in Boston, Massachusetts, makes seed treatments that help plants grow. The technology involves coating the seeds of corn, rice, soybeans and wheat with natural microbes. The result? Plants thrive like they're supposed to.

The private company also appears to be thriving, and recently announced $250 million in new venture capital investments along with a new digital marketplace for buying and selling grain.

Indigo Ag was founded in 2014 by Flagship Pioneering, a Cambridge biotech investment firm, and reportedly has crops growing on about 1 million acres across the United States.


Besides the recent money announcement, Indigo Ag is counting "yield differences so large you can see them from outer space."

Geoffrey von Maltzahn, cofounder and CEO, writes that growers using the company's microbially-treated wheat seeds reported "early vigor, more tillers, and 10 bushel per acre increases at harvest, even with limited rainfall, late freezes, and record high abandonment rates in the region."

The company backed up and looked at 40,000 acres of Indigo commercial fields via satellite, comparing farms who planted Indigo Wheat with those that didn't.

Using data from the Sentinel, MODIS and Landsat satellites, they found a 12.7% median yield increase for farms growing with Indigo.


The startup's seed-coating process is anything but simple. As explained by Successful Farming, Indigo Ag has developed a database of genomic information on plant microbes. It uses that info to predict which microbes are most beneficial to a plant’s health under environmental conditions like heat and drought.

If any of this sounds environmentally concerning, Indigo's Rachel Raymond notes in a write-up that its microbial product in corn has been formally certified for use in organic production systems by OMRI, the Organic Materials Review Institute.

"Given that Indigo microbes are sourced from the environment, and returned to it without any genetic modification, Indigo was able to obtain OMRI certification without obstacle," the company said in March, adding "Our microbial products, derived from nature, are an asset to organic production systems. They provide biological, rather than chemical, solutions to environmental stress and are a much-needed tool in a production system that has access to fewer methods of plant protection.”