Green Lightning Wants To Enable Farmers To Make Their Own Nitrogen
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Fertilizer remains one of the most significant expenses for many farmers. New startup Green Lightning is manufacturing machines that can allow farmers to manufacture some of their nitrogen needs on farm using only energy and water as inputs. Co-founder Travis Potter says in just two seasons of running their machines on farm, the early adopters are already ordering more.
Potter… “I would say this year is really our, our second year doing any kind of like major acreage of what we're doing. We'll be on somewhere around 30,000 acres this year. Next year we'll be well in the a hundred thousand range and we'll be in, you know, 20 countries or something. So one thing is to have it where there's already a lot of nitrogen in the soil. And people are like, well, I did put a lot on last year. Kind of second guess themselves. They're like, let's try it again next year and try it on more plots, you know, see what happens. We didn't give out machines. People bought 'em and then they tried 'em and if they didn't like 'em, they could send 'em back if they wanted to. We had a few guys sent 'em back. We have guys that are on both spectrums, like, you know what, maybe it wasn't quite as good a yield, but my net was up 50 bucks an acre. You know, that's kind of stuff where they're like, that makes a big difference at the end of the day.”
Potter admits that more trials are needed to understand which situations are best suited for their approach and why, but the company has launched a manufacturing facility in Kentucky and are already selling these units around the world.
