“I’d argue that sustainable crop production looks like rural vitality, farmers’ families succeeding, sustaining farms through generations, but also sustaining the environment,” said Jackson Stansell, CEO and Founder of Sentinel Fertigation.

Sentinel Fertigation, based in Lincoln, NE, leverages remote sensing and geospatial data to empower precision nitrogen management, particularly for farmers who fertigate. Sentinel’s N-Time software program helps farmers improve nitrogen use efficiency by 23% and save 42 pounds of nitrogen per acre on average. Sentinel Fertigation will collaborate with Dr. Elliott Kellner to connect with a broad set of research teams across the cohort’s ecosystem.

We start with Sentinel Fertigation, a company that takes a high-level view of irrigated fields. How high? Well, its N‑Time technology analyzes satellite imagery to assess the health of a crop and, on that basis, provides farmers a recommendation about whether or not they need to apply fertilizer. As CEO Jackson Stansell tells us, on-farm trials have demonstrated that N‑Time can save farmers more than 40 pounds of nitrogen per acre.

It may sound impossibly high tech, but irrigated farmers can now base their fertigation regimens on photos taken from space. Nebraska-based Sentinel Fertigation uses an ingenious technique to discern the effects of fertilizer from satellite imagery and then translates that information into application prescriptions that are compatible with most existing fertigation systems.