FarmLogs is Now Able to Alert Farmers About Crop Threats
Featured on Forbes
Farm management software company FarmLogs is used by over 20% of the farms in the U.S. with over $15 billion in crops under management. Now FarmLogs has launched the only crop health monitoring service in the industry that can pinpoint the exact location in the part of the field that needs attention. If a problem is detected in the field that causes a risk of losing yield during the growing season, FarmLogs users will automatically receive actionable maps.
FarmLogs monitors crop health by utilizing multi-spectral satellite imagery to build performance baselines from over five years of field-specific crop health data. The crop health is tracked throughout the season against the performance baseline to detect subtle cues and stress signals that is otherwise invisible to the human eye. The crop health monitoring imagery utilized by FarmLogs shows information that is actionable and eliminates guesswork so that farmers can fix problems before yield is reduced.
If FarmLogs detects crop health anomalies, then it will alert farmers by pinpointing the exact location of the threats. FarmLogs’ mobile app will even guide farmers to the location that needs to be monitored. As a gift to its users, FarmLogs is offering the crop monitoring feature for free this year.
Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, FarmLogs launched about three years ago and participated in the Y Combinator startup accelerator program. FarmLogs raised $10 million in Series B about six months ago, bringing its total institutional funding to $15 million thus far. FarmLogs is used by farmers in all 50 states and internationally in over 130 countries across six continents. FarmLogs currently has 30 employees and the farm management software company plans to double its staff count this year.
FarmLogs’ growth does not come as a surprise because the agriculture technology (“AgTech”) space is thriving. For example,Monsanto acquired Climate Corporation for nearly $1 billion in 2013. And agriculture technology companies received $2.36 billion of investments across 264 deals last year alone, according to AgFunder News. That was higher than the financial technology sector ($2.1 billion) and the clean technology sector ($2 billion).
“We’ve seen how impactful data can be in helping farmers optimize their production. At the same time, we are always looking for ways to minimize the work our users have to do,” said FarmLogs CEO and co-founder Jesse Vollmar in an interview. “Using remote sensing technology to monitor the health of fields made perfect sense as a feature that would do both things. Every row crop farm in America stands to gain from this sort of actionable information.” Vollmar was named in the “30 Under 30: Energy & Industry” FORBES list last year.