October 22, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Founded by Flagship Pioneer in 2015, CIBO began as a “Zillow for farmland”, generating proprietary insights including land and lease valuation (including a price for every single parcel of farmland in the continental U.S.), productivity, stability, elevation, and environmental impact data on a per-parcel basis. Today, the science-based technology company supports growers and enterprises in their transition to regenerative agriculture. 

“Regenerative agriculture is a top priority for both growers and grower-focused businesses, and the key to accelerating agricultural transformation is leveraging science and technology at scale,” said Ignacio Martinez, CIBO co-founder, and general partner, Flagship Pioneering General. “With this funding, CIBO is well-positioned to support industry leading enterprises and growers in achieving their sustainability goals.”

With offices in Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Boston, CIBO uses crop simulation, computer vision, and data science on an unprecedented scale together with machine learning, satellite images, and scientific modeling to understand “how plants grow”.

The platform also centralizes publicly-available data (sourced from the USDA and other government agencies), including owner information, tax data, weather data, satellite images, and soil maps for farmers, investors, financiers, and stakeholders in the U.S. agricultural and rural land base.

Beyond information about the land itself, CIBO is also able to generate deep insights into the ecological effects of farming, calculating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions, nitrate leaching, and carbon sinking in the soil over time. Together, this data is collated to create a quantified sustainability footprint for each parcel of farmland that can drive regenerative agricultural production methods, resulting in benefits for both the environment and society.

This funding also reflects investor confidence in CIBO’s potential to help growers and ag operations achieve their sustainability goals by connecting food and agricultural enterprises to growers in their value chains, and connecting growers to incentives that drive the adoption and success of regenerative agricultural practices.

These connections are able to be facilitated by CIBO through its platforms:

CIBO Impact – announced in late 2020, CIBO Impact is a platform helping farmers generate and sell carbon credits based on their regenerative practices, and includes an online marketplace for individuals and organizations that want to purchase credits directly from U.S. farmers as a way to offset their carbon footprint. 

Developed to unlock the carbon market for approximately half a million American farmers, CIBO Impact will present the opportunity for scaling and accelerating regenerative agriculture by offering farmers a place to easily enroll their land and quantify carbon credits.

The registration process is free and completely automates the verification of regenerative practices and credits using CIBO’s remote sensing and computer vision capabilities. Once practices are verified, the credits are registered on the CIBO Impact marketplace over a single growing season – from cover crop planting in the autumn to the harvesting of a cash crop the following autumn.

CIBO Impact joined the company’s existing intelligence platform, previously launched in the spring of 2020, that gives farmers access to science-based, objective data about nationwide U.S. farmland at the parcel level, which will modernize how farmland is assessed and evaluated.

CIBO further provides both past and in-season management practices and yields, along with the impact quantification of the impact of management practices and weather on future productivity of each parcel. This data – valuation, predicted yield, crops planted, and environmental impact – can all be aggregated at a portfolio, county, state, or national level.

The company offers multiple searches that are free for farmers, managers, and lenders without requiring users to share any of their own data – greatly increasing the transparency of what was once a rather nebulous system of assessing, leasing, buying, and selling farmland. Once these free searches are exhausted, there is a nominal fee for further insights.

“We are delighted that our current and new investors believe in and support the next stage in our mission to drive the widespread adoption of regenerative farming practices,” said Daniel Ryan,CEO, CIBO. “Regenerative practices sequester carbon in the soil and reduce emissions from farming, reversing climate change and making our food system more resilient.”

– Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.