On Barry Knight's iPhone there is a snapshot of a single plant, green and standing tall, among a sea of others, lying dead.

Understanding why some plants survive conditions that kill most others is a part of what keeps him excited to go to work every day.

Knight is the head of research partners for Indigo Ag, a Boston-based agriculture technology company that in December announced plans to open its North American commercial operations headquarters in Downtown Memphis, creating 700 new jobs, while keeping its Boston office as the company's global headquarters.

The company studies plants — soybeans, corn, rice, cotton and others.

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Its researchers analyze the naturally occurring bacteria and fungi that keep plants like the one in Knight's picture alive then coats seeds of other plants with those same microbes in hopes that they will be more likely to survive droughts and other conditions that might otherwise kill them.

The coating is natural and does not change the genetic makeup of the seed and is, therefore, not a form of genetic modification, Knight said. It can be added to any kind of seed to help it be more resilient in harsh environments, use less water, be less reliant on chemical pesticides and produce more food.

Being in Memphis makes sense. It brings the company closer to the farmers who would use the coating.

"What was clear to us in the beginning was that Boston is not close enough to farmers for us to be effective so we immediately started thinking of places outside of Boston," said Knight, who was Indigo Ag's first employee in Memphis. "Within 15 minutes of our Memphis office, we can be in a rice field, a cotton field, a soybean field, a corn field or a peanut field."

Disrupting a $3 trillion industry

Indigo Ag's goal, according to Rachel Raymond, chief operating officer for North America, is to get so good at keeping plants alive that they are able to help farmers grow enough food to feed the planet.

"If we're doing our job, the goal is everybody in the world has a chance to eat multiple times a day," Raymond said. "That's the overarching vision, creating a healthy, sustainable food supply chain for everyone in the world. ... I think it gives the whole team here a lot of energy."

Indigo seeds have already been spread across about 1 million acres of farmland in Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Arkansas and other states, the company said.

To keep growing, Indigo has to be plugged into the challenges farmers face, Raymond said. They need to understand government data and be able to produce their own data faster and more accurately. They need to make it easy to ship their seeds and the resulting crops nationwide. And they need to understand what is important to consumers who are buying the food that grows from Indigo seeds.

In solving for those problems, Indigo launched two new divisions of its company.

Last year it was Indigo Marketplace, a platform for farmers to sell seed to buyers who need them and in January, Indigo Transport, a logistics unit that makes it easier to ship grains that are bulky and therefore expensive and difficult to move.

"The problem is around transparency and information," Raymond said. "Ag is one of the largest industries in the world — depending on how you look at it, it's over $3 trillion — and it's one of the last industries to really be disrupted and innovated on by digital natives."

Other industries have been fundamentally altered by technology. Think what Uber did to transportation, what Airbnb did to the hotel industry and what Netflix did to entertainment. That's the kind of impact Indigo wants to make on agriculture, Raymond said.

"Marketplace and Transport are both opportunities that we see for technology to help solve some of those inefficiencies and unlock a lot of benefits for both sides of the equation. We are very grower-focused but our customers are buyers as well," Raymond added.

In December, Indigo made another major business move when it bought satellite imaging firm TellusLabs.

From the vantage point of a satellite orbiting the Earth, Indigo can understand what is happening on millions of farms worldwide and use that information to help farmers and companies that depend on the crops to work more efficiently and increase profits.

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When the government shut down in December and remained that way into January, Indigo released crop projection data that the U.S. Department of Agriculture could not.

Data-sharing partnerships with individual farmers using Indigo seeds combined with a macro view of the agriculture economy from TellusLabs, sales insights from Marketplace and shipping information from Transport has given Indigo a unique view of the food supply chain that will likely move the company into its next phase: bringing more transparency into what Raymond says is an opaque system.

Food supply transparency

Imagine going to Kroger to buy rice or corn and knowing that the brand you choose was grown with less water and had a smaller carbon footprint than the others on the shelf. Or if right there on the label, you could know what farm grew your food.

If Indigo has any say, that kind of future is sooner than you'd think.

"I think it's a real possibility within the next five to 10 years," Raymond said. "There are a lot of things that need to happen for that to be the case, but the hardest part of transparency in the chain is going from farm into the food processing and with marketplaces and transport helping to provide that, it will move us significantly forward in that quest."

Indigo has already started to partner with companies to create seed coatings that will lower carbon emissions. Indigo Ag and Anheuser-Busch started working together last month to help the Budweiser-maker reach its sustainability goals.

Indigo Ag's microbial seed coating will allow the rice grown for the Budweiser recipe to use about 10 percent less water and nitrogen and reduce its carbon emission, said Jess Newman with Anheuser-Busch, which wants to reduce its carbon emissions by 25 percent by 2025.

While Newman said most of its barley and rice is already grown in the U.S., a future when Anheuser-Busch can label every bottle company-wide with the origin of every grain of rice will take time because of the size of the company. Anheuser-Busch also owns several other brands including Bud Light, Michelob, Shock Top and Stella Artois.

Still, Raymond said, transparency is possible on a small-scale almost immediately.

"They could make specific batches of products from that rice only in which case you would have a bottle of beer where you would be able to trace it back to the farm or set of farms next year," Raymond said. "In order for that to happen broader scale, more companies would need to understand and recognize that value. And I think they do and they do at an increasing rate.

"Now, it's just a matter of moving forward with implementing."

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Desiree Stennett covers economic development and business at The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached at desiree.stennett@commercialappeal.com, 901-529-2738 or on Twitter: @desi_stennett.