A Designer Seed Company Is Building a Farming Panopticon

When Geoffrey von Maltzahn was first pitching farmers to try out his startup's special seeds, he sometimes told them, half-acknowledging his own hyperbole, that "if we're right, you shouldn't just see results in the field, you should be able to see them from outer space." As the co-founder of a company called Indigo Ag, von Maltzahn was hawking a probiotic that he hoped would increase their crop yields dramatically. "I never thought we'd ever actually test that idea," he says. In the three years since Indigo began selling naturally occurring organisms such as bacteria and fungi, spray-coated onto seeds, the company has grown to become perhaps the most valuable agtech company in the world. Pitchbook, for example, estimates Indigo's value at $3.5 billion.