For many, a university dissertation is a slog to survive. Long nights, plenty of coffee, and a trudging race to the impending finish line.
Niels Grabbert approached things a little differently. While finishing his undergraduate degree in Berlin, Grabbert wrote his thesis in English as a way to learn the language. For his master’s, his dad’s cancer diagnosis prompted him to develop a blood sensor to detect biomarkers that could support his treatment.
The resulting thesis ran to more than 100 pages and, more importantly, laid the technical foundations for what would later become Stenon, Grabbert’s soil data company, which has just raised €18 million in a Series B round to expand its technology around the world.
The connection between blood and soil may not be immediately obvious, but for Grabbert, both are complex environments filled with a vast array of biological and chemical signals, with some of the most important present only at very low concentrations.
Grabbert therefore took the enhanced spectroscopic range he’d developed for detecting cancer biomarkers and honed it for measuring nitrogen in the soil, “one of the holy grails in agriculture” because of the difficulty of accurately detecting it.
“There was a lot of research done, but all this research was not really going somewhere,” he says.
Taking the lab into the field
Stenon’s answer was FarmLab, a hardware-software system designed to generate soil data in the field rather than requiring growers to wait for laboratory results.
The device, which some farmers simply describe as “the spade”, is inserted into the soil, where optical and electrical sensors collect data on nitrogen, organic matter, temperature and moisture. Software and AI then translate those measurements into insights that farmers can use to make more precise fertiliser applications.
Stenon has tested its technology across wheat, corn, cotton, coffee, salads and vegetables, and says farmers can see profits increase by between $65 and $120 per hectare, supported by yield boosts of between 2% and 8% and fertiliser reductions of up to 40%.
Investment firm Pymwymic, which led its latest fundraise, said Stenon’s ability to precisely measure nitrogen in the field was a “rare intersection where improving soil health and strengthening farm economics go hand in hand.”
Why speed matters
While farmers in some countries can test for nitrogen by sending samples to a lab, the process can be slow, with results taking days or even weeks. Stenon’s FarmLab, by contrast, allows farmers to push the device into the ground and receive a result within 20 seconds. Repeating the process across a field creates a map showing variations in soil requirements.
“In the morning, somebody can go into the field and take a measurement. After lunch, the fertilizer spreaders are already arriving and taking our data to apply fertilizer to the field,” Grabbert explains.
This is especially important in regions where labs are limited or where farming operations move too quickly to wait for conventional analysis. Brazilian farms, for example, can have limited access to laboratories while operating intensive cropping systems in which growers move rapidly from one crop cycle to the next.
“Brazil is so quick in applying a new crop cycle, they need the data on the spot. They cannot wait for one or two weeks otherwise it’s already too late,” says Grabbert.
A similar timing problem exists in the US, he argues, where farmers may not have time to take samples during the planting season and instead measure nitrogen in the autumn for fertiliser decisions the following spring. This leaves a crucial gap between when the measurement is taken and when the information is used.
The challenge of scaling soil measurement
The key challenge, though, is still scale. Even if Stenon’s readings take less than 20 seconds, collecting enough of them can still be time-consuming on farms of the scale commonly seen in Brazil and the US.
Grabbert recognises this as an issue and explains that several solutions are already in place. In key markets, Stenon’s partners offer a measurement service where they provide both the devices and the labour to generate the maps for the farmer. In other cases, farmers use their own staff to carry out the work.
Smaller farms, however, are often solely supported by fertiliser retailers rather than receiving direct support from Stenon. The reasons are clear.
“We are a tech company. We cannot afford 100 people outside on the fields. It’s not our core,” Grabbert says.
Automation is the next step
But this might all be about to change. Stenon is planning the launch of a new product later this year, intended to address the high volume of work still required to collect sufficient measurements. Grabbert offers few details but says the technology will provide a more automated and integrated approach to collecting soil data.
The race is on. While Stenon has relatively few direct competitors for now, Grabbert expects that to change. Within the next five years, he expects other companies to be “pacing up with us for sure”.
That leaves a small window to convince more farmers that FarmLab can transform their operations before the field becomes a little more crowded.
