Leveraging satellite technology, Indigo releases data on an unprecedented 40,000+ acres from the 2018 commercial wheat harvest

Indigo Wheat™ demonstrates median yield gains of 12.7%, with protein content averaging 13.8%

Growers of Indigo Wheat™ with a 40 bushel per acre average have the potential to earn $44.20 more per acre in the 2018/2019 season

Indigo Ag, Inc., a company dedicated to harnessing nature to help farmers sustainably feed the planet, has released 2018 harvest data from over 40,000 acres of wheat grown through Indigo Production™. Wheat grown in contract with Indigo demonstrated median yield gains of 12.7% when compared to neighboring fields. Responding to demands of buyers and consumers for higher quality grain, the company has also shared the protein content of wheat grown through Indigo Production. Protein content averaged 13.8%, which is an increase of 1.1% over county averages.

Mike Newman, a grower based in Sharon, Kansas, saw substantial improvements in both the quality and yield of his crop. “We’d had less than an inch and a half of rain and just a skiff of snowfall all winter until we started getting adequate moisture. Going into harvest you could tell the difference between Indigo and non-Indigo fields. I thought it would be a 5- to 6-bushel variance but it was an 11- to 12-bushel difference. One of my best Indigo fields produced an average of 52 bushels with a 64-pound test weight; my non-Indigo fields produced 40 bushels and a 61.5-pound test weight. Visually, they were healthier plants. We hit a home run with the production this year.”

For growers engaged in Indigo Production, yield and quality improvements are tied to price premiums. Together, these benefits allow growers to significantly increase their profit margins by working with Indigo. This past year, growers with a 40 bushel per acre average production history (APH) made approximately $36.35 more per acre through Indigo Production. For the upcoming season, these same growers have the potential to earn $44.20 more per acre due to additional premiums for quality and identity preservation included in the 2018/2019 Indigo Wheat™ offer.

“While small plot trials can be valuable for testing new technologies, analyzing commercial data enables us to understand their effect on a larger scale and across a variety of growing conditions,” said David Perry, Indigo’s President and CEO. “This collection of over 40,000 acres of commercial data allows us to demonstrate performance across entire regions, while leading to insights that we can use to continue improving our microbes.”

In July, Indigo released an early view of the 2018 data from side-by-side trials on 24 fields across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas that showed an average increase of 13%. The commercial data announced today represents 423 fields, 180 growers, 78 counties, and 40,167 acres across these same states. Satellite technology produced expansive imagery that allowed Indigo to collect data on this scale. Analyzing this imagery, the company compared yields of Indigo Wheat fields to those of neighboring fields to arrive at this season’s 12.7% gain.

Learn more about Indigo’s data collection process and the role of satellite technology in a blog post from the company’s Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Geoffrey von Maltzahn: Yield Differences So Large You Can See Them from Outer Space