ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Agron.
Sec. Climate-Smart Agronomy
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fagro.2025.1651522
This article is part of the Research TopicSmart Agriculture and Sustainable Crop Production: Enhancing Resilience to Environmental StressesView all articles
Site-Specific Drivers of Sensor-Based Nitrogen Management in On-Farm Corn and Wheat Experiments
Provisionally accepted
Pablo Paccioretti1,2
Laila Puntel3*
Mariano Córdoba2Taro Mieno3Richard Ferguson3Joe Luck3Laura Thompson3
Guillermo Balboa3*- 1Univeristy of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, United States
- 2Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Córdoba, Argentina
- 3University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, United States
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Optimizing nitrogen (N) fertilization is essential for enhancing nitrogen use efficiency (NUE), maximizing crop yields, and minimizing environmental impacts. Sensor-based technologies, integrated with variable rate applications, present a promising approach to site-specific N management. However, their effectiveness can differ across crops, soils, and topographic properties. This study compared sensor-based N management with conventional grower practices in corn and wheat over 17 on-farm site-years. Additionally, we evaluated key site-specific factors influencing sensor performance on a 57 on-farm trial dataset. Our results showed that sensor-based N management significantly improved NUE in corn compared to Grower conventional practices, reducing on average 40 kg N ha-1 without compromising yield. However, in wheat, the differences were not statistically significant across all trials, suggesting that crop-specific responses affect sensor effectiveness. Our findings highlight that corn field yield productivity, its variability, and soil texture were the most influential factors affecting sensor-based NUE. Sensor-based approach in corn outperformed grower practices in moderate to high-variability fields. These results suggest that while sensor-based N management enhances NUE in corn, its effectiveness in wheat may vary more. This study provides valuable insights into the practical limitations and site-specific factors influencing the success of sensor-based technologies, aiding in developing improved decision-support tools for precision nitrogen management.
Keywords: nitrogen use efficiency, sensor-based N management, precision agriculture, variablerate technology, Site-specific N management
Received: 21 Jun 2025; Accepted: 22 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Paccioretti, Puntel, Córdoba, Mieno, Ferguson, Luck, Thompson and Balboa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Laila Puntel, lpuntel2@unl.edu
Guillermo Balboa, gbalboa7@unl.edu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.