If you know what to look for, those endless rows of corn that paint the Midwest in summer are full of a lot more than just cattle feed and future Doritos. They’re full of data.

Now, it’s not news that data science can and should be applied to agriculture. The field of precision agriculture has received a lot of attention over the past few years thanks to advances in sensors and computer vision technologies, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists are now lining up to fund startups that can apply the power of predictive models to all that data. Last year, agri-business giant Monsanto bought a San Francisco-based startup called Climate Corporation, which crunched weather, soil and all sorts of other data to power crop-insurance models, for $930 million.

But the story of Mankato, Minn.-based company Farm Intelligence is still interesting. For one, it proves that you don’t need a Silicon Valley connection to make…