Indigo is reinventing the way the world cultivates its food and fiber. By harnessing beneficial microbes and digital technologies, Indigo enables growers to produce higher quality harvests that both enhance the surrounding ecosystem and improve human health. Indigo then connects these growers to buyers who seek differentiated products. To build a more beneficial agriculture, Indigo enables farmers to reliably earn more profit, to sustainably feed billions of people, and to dramatically improve the planet we live on. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA, with additional offices in Memphis, TN, Research Triangle Park, NC, Sydney, Australia, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and São Paulo, Brazil. www.indigoag.com

Systems Innovation is the idea factory for Indigo. We are an interdisciplinary team of business, science, and technology professionals that drive radical change in agriculture through new systems of farming.

To develop and deploy these systems, we:

• Identify, create, evaluate, and accelerate new opportunities that span technological and business innovations. We drive these innovations
• Draw inspiration from our own diverse experiences but are always seeking perspectives from a broader ecosystem of internal and external stakeholders.
• Establish a strategic vision but are not afraid to get in the weeds on operationalizing a new business unit.
• Set ambitious goals and stretch our limits but take the time to pause and reflect on our work.

The role of Agricultural Economist, Systems Innovation will support teams cross-functionally across Indigo to develop rigorous sets of data that drive grower profitability.

Responsibilities

• Own the master view of how Indigo defines grower profitability in collaboration with key stakeholders (Agronomy, Product, Marketplace, Systems Innovation)
• Support the Terraton Initiative to define metrics for profitability:
  • Refine the Terraton Experiment & Indigo Carbon grower surveys
  • Contribute to the development of scoring rubrics for entrants to the Terraton Challenge in the “reward” category
• Collaborate with the Strategy team on questions related to the Five-Year plan or other financial projections
• Contribute to interface design in Indigo Fields for communicating profitability data to growers
• Draft outlines for the first grower profitability focused paper to be published by the Terraton Experiment
  • Contribute to the publication of scientific papers with profitability data analysis, figure generation, and writing
• Update the Systems Innovation valuation frameworks and help to create a roadmap of the most valuable grower decisions for Indigo to innovate against

Competencies

• Understands the financing behind running an operation (e.g. purchasing seeds and equipment, hiring labor, applying for loans, marketing grain)
• Pragmatic; does not allow perfect to be the enemy of the good
• Understands interactions with co-ops, retailers, banks, insurers, buyers, and others in the economic landscape
• Able to create clear, concise frameworks for complex ideas and concepts
• Strong communicator; can produce compelling visualizations and clear prose to communicate drivers of farm economics; able to clearly communicate complex topics to diverse stakeholders
• Extremely empathetic to growers
• Willing to do necessary tasks, even menial ones, with joy
• Able to drive consensus among a diverse set of stakeholders
• Intuitive understanding of risk, uncertainty, and other statistical concepts
• Able to deliver on deadlines, sometimes challenging ones
• Capable of living in data and extracting insights
• Able to work collaboratively across teams and priorities

Qualifications

• 5+ years’ work experience interacting directly with growers
• Bachelors in agronomy, economics, or related field (MS or PhD a plus)
• Experience with farm financial management and agricultural lending process a plus
• Experience with technical writing (peer reviewed publications a plus)
• SQL, Excel, R, Stata, farm financial modeling software experience a plus
• Familiar with the Farm Financial Standards Guidelines
• Basic understanding of production agriculture in the US
• Based in Boston preferred or willing to travel extensively