Welcome to the 57th Edition of Upstream Ag Professional!
Index
EarthOptics, Pattern Ag Merge to Digitize Soil Health for Climate and Agriculture
Deere leads HabiTerre’s $10m Series A first close to build ‘the global standard’ for sustainability metrics
Precision Spraying Technology Research from Iowa State and Behavioral Change
Jevons Paradox, Complement Disruption and Precision Applications in Agriculture: Implications for Crop Protection Manufacturers
The shift from single-task autonomous solutions to smart implements
Bayer's Strategies to Increase Biologicals Adoption
Syngenta Integrates CropwiseAI into GHX App
H1 2024 Results for Syngenta Group
Q2 2024 Crop Protection Results Highlights and Analysis
Landus launches new health coverage plans for farmers: Is Landus Becoming FBN 2.0?
Fractal Agriculture Expands Farmer-Aligned Equity Investment Product Amid Turbulent Ag Economy
Sources of Edge
Other Interesting Ag Articles (6 this week)
1. EarthOptics, Pattern Ag Merge to Digitize Soil Health for Climate and Agriculture - Globe Newswire
Key Takeaways
EarthOptics and Pattern Ag have merged to create a category-leading company focused on digitizing soil health for advanced crop management and climate sustainability, providing a comprehensive “digital twin” of soil, including physical, chemical, and biological properties.
The newly formed company, operating under the EarthOptics name, will lead Predictive Agronomy. It will offer farmers high-resolution data on soil properties, pest detection, fertilization, and industry-first tillage prescriptions to optimize crop management and input decisions.
EarthOptics and Pattern Ag have merged, creating a category leader in soil digitization to power advanced crop management and climate sustainability.
The newly combined soil intelligence company will operate under the name EarthOptics and be the authoritative source of soil insights and the leader in Predictive Agronomy. Its comprehensive data will enable farmers, ranchers, and their advisors to know their soil's exact physical, chemical, and biological properties, helping them plan their most impactful input and management decisions to maximize profitability and sustainability goals.
This soil company combination takes Pattern Ag’s biology and lab-based analysis with field-based sensing technologies from EarthOptics to create a higher-resolution understanding of the soil— combining insights into pests and pathogens, nutrients, soil compaction, carbon levels, or more broadly combining the biological, chemical and physical parameters of soil:
Rationale
Earth Optics has a soil mapping sensor (GroundOwl measurement sensor system) that can deliver high resolution data points, primarily on some of the chemical (nutrient) and physical parameters of soil. This has scalability to it, but still requires the collecting of and processing of soil cores (traditional soil tests) for many of the services they offer, which is an expensive endeavor. On top, they have a gap in terms of having a deeper pathogen and biological understanding of soil.
Pattern Ag is a soil testing company that specialized in assessing soil biology and then leveraging those biological insights to create predictive tools about pest outbreaks and soil health. Because they were already taking a test and needed to offer a more robust soil test to their customer base, they were testing for physical and chemical parameters in their lab as well.
From the explanations of each we can see two direct benefits to the merger:
Operational cost reduction for EarthOptics by gaining the lab capabilities of PatternAg.
High resolution soil insight + ability to understand the major pillars of the soil (biological, chemical, physical) in one spot.
They had already leaned into these benefits by collaborating to establish a product together called “360 Pro” that delivers insights to farm customers surrounding all soil parameters, from nutrients, to pests, to compaction and more. EarthOptics is positioned as a company that can deliver some of the most well-rounded soil insights to farmer.
Agronomically, and product wise there is sound logic there for the merger. But the the deal feels more reactionary than strategic given the current environment.
Challenging Environment
Together these entities have raised almost $90 million. PatternAg has raised $50 million and EarthOptics has raised almost $39 million. Both of these entities likely had a valuation in the 9 figure range post money from their previous raise. The combination of these two players is not a 1 + 1 = 2 in terms of valuation.
