New Tool For Fertigation
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
One challenge with bringing new technologies to the agriculture industry is every farm does things a little bit differently. So ag tech needs to be both scalable but also adaptable. Sentinel Fertigation CEO Jackson Stensell says they’ve designed their product to be not only easy to use for the farmer, but adaptable to their local context.
Stensell...“Really what it boils down to is the hardest part of this is working with a farmer to determine which application of theirs we're going to embed that high and low nitrogen calibration into. And ultimately that's the hardest part of this entire process. We've had farmers do everything from fall anhydrous to strip-till to applications in two by two at planting to side dress to fertigation to get these plots into the field. And so that's what we've really worked hard to master is how can we scale this calibration approach once that's done. The system is running everything autonomously in the background. We automatically contract the satellite imagery. We're automatically assessing every image that comes in to quantify that nitrogen sufficiency and we're automatically sending out recommendations on the basis of that tracked nitrogen sufficiency to tell the farmer when and how much nitrogen to apply. So that's really ultimately the hardest thing. Typically fields configuration to get that prescription out is about 10 minutes. And so it's a very quick process to get fields configured in the software.”
The company has started deploying their technology on irrigated corn acres.
