- Farm data management platform Leaf Agriculture has raised $11.3 million in Series A financing.
- Spero Ventures led the round, which also included participation from “all existing investors.”
- Leaf will use the new funds to expand its product offerings and partnerships as well as grow its team.
Lost in farm data translation
Leaf’s farm data API and platform aims to make data management easier for companies working in crop insurance, seed and chemical, biotech, and other areas.
About 72% of farms now collect data on their fields, up from just 33% in 2013, says Leaf cofounder and CEO G. Bailey Stockdale.
“This rapid increase has created a good deal of new value, but it has also introduced hundreds of incompatible file formats, broken integrations, and a large challenge for anyone building with the data.”
“APIs are brittle and change often in all industries. Agriculture is no exception,” Spero general partner Andrew Parker wrote in a recent blog post. “As farm equipment manufacturers improve their APIs with each new version and model release, those changes will break your services if you don’t have a clean layer of abstraction that can handle these changes as they emerge. Leaf handles this better than any single development team can do on their own.”
Leaf, says Stockdale, “helps companies access, manage, and use their user’s farm data. Our unified API connects with data providers like John Deere, Climate Fieldview, CNHi, AgLeader, Planet Labs, Valley Irrigation, etc., translates their proprietary files into a consistent format, cleans the data, associates it with Field Boundaries, and then makes it available for further processing.”
A ‘lingua franca’ for farm data
Rather than working directly with farmers, Leaf is designed for companies that support the food and agriculture system. Leaf pulls in data from third-party APIs or uploaded data to translate, format and clean it as well as make it available. The idea is to make companies’ offerings compatible with all farms in one single integration.
Spero — who has joined the board of Leaf — calls this “API-as-a-Service” a type of product that is “a lingua franca for the common mess of proprietary data formats and competing standards that cause user data to stay inert in silos, due to the difficulty of wrangling them.
“The cost of using Leaf pays for itself in both lower initial development costs and reduced maintenance costs,” he adds.
Crop insurance companies are one example, explains Stockdale. These companies can now offer insurance for only the planted area of a field instead of the government-defined property tax boundary, which can mean discounts for farmers enrolled in an insurance company’s precision ag program.
“Crop insurance companies use Leaf to precisely determine the planted area from the data generated by the machines operating on the field,” says Stockdale. “This is an extremely high quality source of data, and Leaf helps bring data from any tractor (hundreds of incompatible file formats) to a single, consistent format, allowing insurance companies to deploy their precision programs on any farm.”
He says another example is how Leaf works with biotech and regenerative agriculture, where “companies need to prove that specific activities happened during a season (e.g., a farmer applied more or less fertilizer, planted certain crops, yield of a field was above or below a threshold, etc.) in order to certify that the resulting crop qualifies for regenerative ag subsidies or a premium price.
“These companies use field boundaries, machine data, and satellite imagery from Leaf to validate that their program’s management practices were followed.”
Where the funding will go
Leaf raised a $5 million seed round in 2022 led by S2G Ventures with participation from Cultivian, Radicle Growth, SP Ventures, and others.
The Series A funding will go towards building out Leaf’s go-to-market team and bring the platform to more companies. Stockdale says the company is also investing in shipping new products.
“Our upcoming products will offer new ways for companies to use Leaf including running end-to-end workflows on Leaf without needing to do any additional data processing on their side.”
He says Leaf will also release new data cleaning and quality tools that will “further help companies using Leaf to package their data for analytics, AI models, and more.”
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