Solinftech corporate development director Renato Hersz speaks at the AgriNovas 2018 Agbioscience Innovation Summit Thursday about the company's decision to put its U.S. headquarters in Indiana. (Samantha Horton/IPB News)
Brazilian ag tech company Solinftec has announced it will invest $50.6 million to locate its U.S. headquarters in Indiana.
Farmers are adding new sensors to their fields and their equipment each season, and that generates an ever-increasing amount of data. Solinftec wants to help better aggregate that information and use it to further automate farming processes.
“It means lower costs and higher yields,” says Solinftec corporate development director Renato Hersz.
He says the company’s technology aims to give farmers better data by connecting their devices and increase profit margins.
“In sugarcane in Brazil, 40 percent of the cost is harvesting and logistics,” says Hersz. “By optimizing the fleet in utilization, we managed to reduce this cost 20 percent.”
The informatics company already works with more than 16 million acres offering a range of services that Hersz says will cost farmers roughly $3 to $5 per acre annually.
Indiana has about 65,000 jobs in the ag bioscience sector – a field worth about $16 billion annually to the state’s economy. AgriNovus Indiana President and CEO Beth Bechdol says the company’s decision to invest in Indiana is a big win for farmers and the tech industry.
“This is a company on the move,” says Bechdol. “They have a large footprint in Brazil that will be demonstrated. They are making this move into the U.S., into the Midwest, into row crop production.”
Hersz says Solinftec wanted to be more accessible to American clients and the West Lafayette location gives them access to both farmland and talent from the Purdue University.
“We’ll have the headquarters out of Purdue and we also plan to have regional offices to be close to the farmer,” he says.
The company will operate its headquarters in Purdue University’s Research Park and plans to create about 90 jobs in 2019 and increase its workforce to more than 334 employees by 2022.
