How This Company Is Revolutionizing the Way Farmers Do Their Job FarmLogs turns to big data to update age-old practices.

Growing up in rural Michigan, Jesse Vollmar watched as technology transformed the world around him, while life on the farm remained labor-intensive and stuck in the past. "There was a widening gap between what was possible and what was actually being applied to agriculture," he says.

In 2012 Vollmar and fellow computer science grad Brad Koch founded Ann Arbor-based FarmLogs. Their goal: to create web and mobile software that gives farmers instant access to soil maps, rainfall statistics and heat mapping and growth analyses to help make farming more efficient and profitable.

FarmLogs partnered with a satellite operator to gather and analyze data from the past five growing seasons. Armed with information about rainfall, temperature and soil conditions, the startup created comprehensive maps of conditions in the fields—the type of intel farmers once had to gather by traversing every acre under production, manually noting any changes they observed.