Commercializing University Research - Part Two

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

We’re reporting this week on how university ag research gets commercialized. One such example is Jackson Stansell, who was a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His research on fertigation in irrigated corn, led him to put his Ph.D. on hold to build a company around it, which has now become Sentinel Fertigation.

Stansell… “We really focused on-farm research. And so from the very get go, we were working with cooperating producers around the state of Nebraska and we were simultaneously developing the technology while also validating it in the field. And what that showed over the course of three growing seasons was profitability improvement of $23 an acre and a nitrogen use efficiency improvement of 25%. And really seeing those numbers is what ultimately said, okay, we're getting to the end of a grant cycle. We don't want this technology to die because it has really great potential to positively impact farmers and agronomists. And really the only way to take that forward was to found a startup company. And so that's what I chose to do with the blessing of my advisor back in September, 2021. So I actually stepped away. I'd started a PhD and stepped away from that to really take on the company. I'm still technically enrolled, but it's no progress has been made in the last two years. I guess we'll say that.”

But a lot of progress has been made with Sentinel Fertigation which is now available commercially to farmers.