West Lafayette agtech company a finalist in New York competition
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An agriculture technology company headquartered in West Lafayette is competing for the $1 million grand prize in a business competition in New York.
LeafSpec, which has developed a first-of-its-kind portable hyperspectral crop leaf imager, is one of 20 finalists in Grow-NY, a competition designed to enhance food, beverage and agriculture innovation in upstate New York.
President and CEO Jian Jin says the technology allows growers to see more information about pigments, nutrients, disease, and other stresses on crop leaves much earlier than the human eye would notice.
Jin told Inside INdiana Business he came to the competition after conducting a research seminar at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and caught the eye of local growers.
“They see how what we can do here in the Midwest can also help the New York growers,” Jin said. “They have a lot of the fruit growers, vineyards, and also a lot of the greenhouse tomato and lettuce growers near the metropolitan area. So for those facilities, people are really in need of very high accuracy sensors to tell them when and how much they should have putting water and the fertilizers in the greenhouse production. So they can really manage their greenhouse growing much better.”
LeafSpec was founded in 2018, but Jin, who is also an associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University, has been developing the technology for over 15 years.
The company has developed imager that can be configured for different types of crops, including rice and wheat, corn, and dicot plants such as soybeans, potatoes and tomatoes. Jin describes the device as like a magic wand.
“[With] a corn leaf, we just use our handheld device to slide over very quickly, and just a few seconds later, you can see the nutrients including nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and some of the major diseases and also some of the chemical spray damages,” he said. “And each measurement is also geo-referenced, so we have a web database to provide farmers the eventual map of the field after multiple locations of scanning.”
The technology also includes a software component that collects the data created by the scans.
Jin said he believes LeafSpec has an advantage in the New York competition because of the exclusivity of the company’s device.
“When we innovated that about seven years ago, it was the world’s first handheld hyperspectral crop leaf imager of this type. And then seven years later, I haven’t seen any other institutes or other companies who are able to develop such kind of technology. So, we are still the only company which has this technology,” said.
The company is well protected from an intellectual property standpoint, Jin said, after partnering with Purdue to receive several patents on the technology. He added they are also very well connected with the ag industry.
LeafSpec touts many big name companies among its clients, including Corteva Agriscience, Bayer, Sumitomo Chemical, and local agencies such as the Indiana Soybean Alliance and the Office of the Indiana State Chemist.
LeafSpec is one of just three Midwest companies named finalists in the competition. The majority of finalists are on the East Coast, but others are located in California, Georgia, the United Kingdom, Canada and India.
The finalists will pitch their business plans Grow-NY Food and Ag Summit in Binghamton, New York in November. The winner will receive $1 million, with two companies receiving $500,000 and four receiving $250,000.
Looking ahead, Jin said the biggest challenges for LeafSpec are manufacturing and marketing.
The company has a small number of technicians who are able to assemble the devices for customers, which Jin said is a relatively new development. Previously, he was only able to assemble about one device a year on his own, but with a new team of technicians, the company has earned about $350,000 in sales.
As it looks to boost its manufacturing and marketing efforts, Jin said he believes the company could lead what is expected to be a $10 billion digital ag market.