Innov8.ag Acquires 2nd Sight Bioscience

On Wednesday, Walla Walla, WA-based Innov8.ag announced the cash and stock acquisition of 2nd Sight Bioscience, an agricultural labor tracking and inventory systems provider.  Innov8.ag officials said integrating Spokane, WA-based 2nd Sight’s all-in-one labor, yield tracking and produce traceability capabilities with their ecosystem of agronomic and yield management technologies will help specialty crop growers and food companies “plan smarter, act faster and optimize their decision-making process with end-to-end data integration”. 

Innov8.ag added with the ag industry facing a variety of challenges, such as labor shortages, climate change impacts, food safety and traceability demands, and trade and tariff disruptions, integrating and unlocking data capabilities is essential to maintaining operational profitability.

“Bringing 2nd Sight under the innov8.ag umbrella gives growers and agribusiness CFOs a powerful response to what’s keeping them up at night when it comes to staying profitable,” noted Steve Mantle, Innov8.ag founder and CEO.  “It’s about bringing together the right people, equipment and processes that turn data into clarity, in the field, in the packhouse and on the grocery shelf, at a time when agriculture simply can’t wait any longer for big ideas to turn into actionable solutions.”

With labor a common concern amongst domestic and international growers, harnessing AI to unlock new data insights from 2nd Sight’s labor-focused software and hardware solutions are critical to growers’ profitability.

“At 2nd Sight, we’ve always wanted to not just save growers money, but make them money. Combining our expertise in labor and inventory tracking with the work Innov8.ag has already put in to make data actionable for growers at the agronomic, yield and production practices level unveils a whole new level of insights that can quickly be turned into daily gains,” said Kevin Oldenburg, 2nd Sight founder and CEO.

2nd Sight is best know for their FairPick and FairTrak systems automate harvest tracking by weight, by hour and by piece rates, using employee-assigned RFID cards and a rugged, tamper-proof, legal-for-trade harvest scale system to capture weighed crops, such as blueberries, or scan per-unit or per-task data, such as a bushel of tomatoes or a row of apple trees pruned.  Both systems generate receipts for farm laborers for accountability and automatically upload records at the end of the day for real-time daily harvest and task management.  FairPick and FairTrak systems are currently deployed across hundreds of fruit and vegetable farms in the U.S. and internationally, with seamless support in multiple languages and both imperial and metric measurements.

With the acquisition deal, Innov8.ag acquires all of 2nd Sight’s assets, including their intellectual property, inventory and customer base, and will retain the staff. Oldenburg will step down from his day-to-day role but take over as Innov8.ag’s board chair.

Click Here to learn more about 2nd Sight Bioscience.

Click Here to learn more about Innov8.ag.

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