Next to water, the most yield limiting factor in many agricultural areas worldwide is nitrogen. With each passing year, nitrogen grows more costly and the effects of applying to much can also result in environmental pollution.
In the early 1990s, agricultural engineers and plant and soil scientists at Oklahoma State University began seeking a way to measure plant vigor in an effort to accurately calculate the optimum amount of nitrogen to apply to various crops. More than a decade of work by dozens of professors and graduate students finally resulted in the Greenseeker, a handheld unit that does just what its inventors hoped.
Advances in sensor technology have reduced costs, making them affordable to practically every farmer in America. They are now marketed by Trimble.
Norman Borlaug, the Nobel laureate and wheat breeder credited with the Green Revolution, was an outspoken advocate of applying technological solutions to help feed the world. Borlaug’s granddauther, Julie Borlaug, said he had made many friends at OSU, including one of the inventors of the Greenseeker, Bill Raun. Over the years, Norman Borlaug remained keenly interested in the progress of the technology up until his death in 2006.
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