The Sentinel Story
A problem worth solving.
Farmers face a major challenge every day - make the right decisions in a complex environment to meet demand and keep their business profitable. Nitrogen management decisions are some of the most challenging to make. Nitrogen fertilizer accounts for nearly 1/3 of input costs and sufficient availability is necessary for healthy crops and high yields. Determining an optimal application program to match each year is complicated. Too little nitrogen and your yield might suffer. Too much and you’re wasting money. These problems have led to attention for regulators regarding fertilizer contamination of water resources. Add into the mix biological products, cover crops, manure, tillage changes, irrigation and a host of other management practices and the challenge grows even greater.
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This dilemma drew Sentinel Ag's Founder & CEO Jackson Stansell to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln as a graduate student in 2019 to join a team of researchers working to develop a nitrogen management solution.
Jackson flies a drone over a corn field in Eastern NE during the 2019 growing season. While we've since progressed to satellites from drone imagery, we are still rooted in science and quality data.
The Sentinel team works with farmer customers to ensure the highest quality outcomes on their fields.
A solution built for farmers, with farmers.
With support from the Nebraska Corn Board and the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute, Jackson and a team of researchers worked with cooperating corn growers around Nebraska to develop and test a system for using field imagery to inform nitrogen management decisions. The team produced a software called N-Time and on-farm validation trials from 2019 through 2021 showed promising results.
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$23/ac profit improvement
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25% increase in nitrogen use efficiency.
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These results couldn't be ignored. To get the technology in the hands of agronomists and farmers at scale, Jackson founded Sentinel Ag in September of 2021.
Pursuing our vision.
Since June of 2022, agronomists and farmers have deployed Sentinel to enhance nitrogen management in their operations. We started in fertigation and used what we learned to develop industry-leading technology for nitrogen management in all production systems. Data collected to date suggests that Sentinel has put $4.2 million back in farmers pockets and prevented 3 million pounds of Nitrogen from being unnecessarily applied.