
The Sentinel Story
A problem worth solving.
Farmers face a major challenge everyday - 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 the cost of production and sufficient availability is necessary for healthy crops and high yields. Determining crop nitrogen demand and an optimal application program year over year is complicated. Too little and your yield might suffer. Too much and you’re wasting money and may be inadvertently contaminating water and air resources. Add into the mix biological products, cover crops, manure, irrigation, tillage changes, and a host of other management practices and the challenge grows even greater.
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This dilemma drew Sentinel Founder & CEO Jackson Stansell to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln as a graduate student in 2019 to join a team of researchers working on a solution.


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 in September of 2021.
Pursuing our vision.
Since June of 2022, agronomists and farmers have deployed Sentinel's N-Time insights to enhance nitrogen management in their operations. Data collected to date suggests that Sentinel has put $2.76 million back in farmers pockets and prevented 1.25 million pounds of Nitrogen from being unnecessarily applied.