With the increasing nitrogen prices, there’s a great opportunity to take the Nitrogen Challenge by trying sensing-based technology on your farm this growing season to help with nitrogen management. How does it work?

• Apply a pre-plant base rate to your field between 50-100 lb N/ac.
• Apply any additional nitrogen the plant needs in season using a sensing based technology like Sentinel Ag.

For the pre-plant base rate, I know only 50-100 lb N/ac is a hard adjustment for many, but in order to use the sensing technology, you really need to have a base rate no more than 120 lb N/ac.

Then somewhere on half of your field, apply a strip of 30 lb N/ac less than your base rate and a strip right next to it of 60 lb N/ac greater than your base rate. Repeat these two strips on the other half of the field. For example, if your base rate is 100 lb N/ac, the low base rate would be 70 lb N/ac and right next to it would be a high strip of 160 lb N/ac. Make sure there’s a high/low paired strip on each side of your field.

The next step is using a sensing technology like Sentinel Ag to monitor when your plants need any additional nitrogen in season. How do you get started? You can go to: https://www.sentinelag.tech/contact to contact Sentinel Ag and connect with a customer service provider.

From there it’s a matter of getting your field(s) into the system and imagery will be received each day during the growing season when cloud cover isn’t a hindrance. Our on-farm research growers since 2022 have saved on average 52 lb N/ac. We’ve had growers locally use Sentinel Ag who never applied additional nitrogen in the growing season. That usually only happens when there’s already high residual nitrate in the soil. However, it’s a great way to utilize that already existing nitrate and to avoid it leaching to the groundwater.

I also stress this as a nitrogen management tool beyond just reducing the amount of nitrogen applied. The satellite imagery has shown when terminated cover crops released their nutrients to the growing crop. We’ve also seen situations where growers added a 60 lb N/ac in-season rate at the correct timing during rapid growth phase and increase yields by 20 bu/ac. Those are things that we as agronomists can’t predict as we can’t predict mineralization for each field nor can we see the light spectrums that the sensors on the satellites can see that detect stress. It’s a beautiful thing how technology is allowing decades of research to become very practical and usable for growers!

So, for those frustrated by nitrogen prices, this is a great year to try in-season nitrogen management for yourself! And, for anyone using Sentinel Ag this year, we’re beginning peer mentoring groups. What does this mean? It can be scary and hard to try new technologies. Growers who have been using Sentinel Ag have volunteered to serve as peer mentors to other interested growers. We plan to help with understanding the imagery, fertigation, and just walk alongside each other to help with confidence in decisions and what we’re seeing. There’s much power in peer learning! If you’re interested in being a part of the Sentinel Ag Peer Mentoring Groups, please contact me at jrees2@unl.edu. We hope to get started by the end of March/beginning of April.

Richard Ferguson has retired after 40 years of service as a UNL Extension Soils Specialist and he will be greatly missed! His retirement celebration will be this Friday, March 20th from 2-4 p.m. at the Goodding Learning Center at UNL’s East campus. There’s also an online book for well-wishes at: https://go.unl.edu/ferguson-retire.