We head inside the Varied Industries tent at the 2025 Farm Progress Show in Decatur, Ill., for a look at InnerPlant’s groundbreaking CropVoice technology. The seed technology company launched the first-of-its-kind platform, powered by a network of plots featuring InnerSoy — a soybean engineered to signal when it’s under attack from fungus, giving farmers and agronomists access to stress signals directly from plants. Sean Yokomizo, VP of Communications, gives us a live demo at the InnerPlant booth. 

"What we have here is a traditional soybean, and when I laze it, you can see the chlorophyll fluorescence, so if we went outside and looked at the corn, looked at the grass, you'd see this red glow because that's just chlorophyll. But over here you can see the inner soy inner plant signal, which is the plant saying, "Hey, I've activated genes in my immune system to fight off fungus. I'm infected, come help me." What that looks like commercially is we create a fungal detection network similar to a cell network. Instead of cell towers, we build plots using this sensor to create a network of plots that are imaged twice a day by this machine. And when we see a signal like the bright green on the left-hand side of the screen, we know that there's a fungal infection in that area and we alert farmers via text or John Deere operation center that they have an infection near their field."

"And because it's tied to the plant's immune system, it's weeks before they see the symptoms in the field, so they have plenty of time to take action to preserve their yields. This year has been amazing. We're covering 50,000 acres in our initial year. We had actually the world's first detection of an active fungal infection in real time, first time in 10,000 years of agriculture that's happened. We detected it in July in Northeast Nebraska, an active fungal infection. We notified the farmers and we actually have control plots in that area, so four and a half weeks after we notified those farmers, we actually saw white mold symptoms in our fields, so the farmers that we alerted had a four and a half week head start to take action in their field to preserve their yields."

InnerPlant CropVoice has covered 50,000 acres in its first year of commercial availability so far.