Meet the Minnesota company pulling petabytes of data from the field

If you know what to look for, those endless rows of corn that paint the Midwest in summer are full of a lot more than just cattle feed and future Doritos.

They’re full of data. Now, it’s not news that data science can and should be applied to agriculture.

The field of precision agriculture has received a lot of attention over the past few years thanks to advances in sensors and computer vision technologies, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists are now lining up to fund startups that can apply the power of predictive models to all that data. For one, it proves that you don’t need a Silicon Valley connection to make it big in the data business. It also highlights just how much data we’re talking about when it comes to quantifying the farm. Hint: It’s a lot.

If the numbers are any indication, the product, which is delivered as a cloud service and is only a few years old (it’s actually an affiliate of an older company called Superior Edge) seems to work. Farm Intelligence is managing about a million acres of land right now (most of its users have at least 1,000 acres), but Kickert expects that number will be well into the eight-figure range soon enough. And as the technology advances, it’s figuring out ways to capture even more data about each one of those acres.