InnerPlant, a crop disease monitoring and biotech company founded in 2018, grows engineered crops that give off a fluorescent light when a disease is present. It plants these sensor seeds in more than 60 test plots across the United States, including Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and South Dakota, watches for emerging diseases and sends the findings to farmers as scouting reports through its CropVoice platform.
In 2026 the company issued 19 soybean disease alerts, covering Cercospora leaf blight, frogeye leaf spot, white mould, sudden death syndrome and Diaporthe, Gary Schaefer, InnerPlant's chief commercial officer, told AgNavigator. Soybean disease pressure was relatively moderate in economic terms, he said, but farmers often had to deal with several diseases and new threats at once.
Cercospora leaf blight is one of them. Cases have increased across the Midwest, and while the disease has not cut yields much, it is showing up at harvest as lower grain quality, usually a purple stain on the beans. "I don't think it's a disease that's on many folks' radar," Schaefer said.
Corn has been the harder crop. Growers have faced what Schaefer called "extreme levels of disease pressure" in recent years, and InnerPlant will extend its service to corn next year. "Tar spot in Nebraska is the headline disease," he said, adding that there is "no silver bullet" and that farmers need to know when the disease is infecting plants, how it is progressing and whether it is intensifying.
This year 200 farmers used CropVoice on 140,000 acres of soybeans to time fungicide sprays more accurately, and 93 percent of them have signed up for next year. The company plans to sell through about 500 retail locations in 2027, up from roughly 300, has hired three agronomy sales managers and is opening a commercial and operations centre outside Des Moines, Iowa. It will also give farmers a personal control centre that sends reports by text message.
Doug Sauder, John Deere's vice president of product management and user experience, has joined InnerPlant's board. Deere invested in the company, he said, because its "living-sensor technology" combined with Deere's digital tools and precision equipment could help farmers spot problems earlier, protect yield and use inputs more efficiently. InnerPlant plans to start its 2027 forecast research in January or February.
Photo: Lynn Betts, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Source: AgNavigator
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