US Agtech CEO Sina Behmanesh on Sentinel X: New Non-Chemical Tech Targeting Fall Armyworm in Nigeria

A widening gap between what Nigerian commercial farmers invest and what they eventually harvest, particularly maize growers in the North, has been linked largely to the destructive spread of Fall Armyworm, according to Dr Sina Behmanesh, Chief Executive Officer of Informiton, a Virginia-based agricultural and biometrical technology firm.

In an interview, Behmanesh said the disparity between American and Nigerian agriculture is often misunderstood as simply a matter of one system being more advanced than the other. He argued that the two are, in fact, fundamentally different enterprises: American farming is capital-intensive and labour-scarce, allowing a single farmer to manage vast landholdings alone with the support of machinery, credit, insurance, storage and infrastructure that effectively absorb risk on his behalf. Nigerian agriculture, by contrast, remains labour-rich and capital-scarce, dominated by smallholders typically farming between one and five hectares, who absorb risks that their American counterparts rarely encounter directly.

While acknowledging that a real and measurable yield gap exists between the two systems, Behmanesh cautioned against assuming Nigeria must retrace America's decades-long path of building extensive physical infrastructure before closing that gap. He pointed to Nigeria's experience with mobile banking, which bypassed traditional branch networks entirely, as an example of how the country could similarly adopt technologies that skip physical build-out requirements in agriculture. He also noted that Nigeria retains crop diversity, a wide climatic range and a young farming population that many developed agricultural systems have lost over time, even as those systems remain narrowly efficient but increasingly fragile.

Asked about the biggest challenge facing farmers across tropical Africa, Behmanesh pointed to the growing problem of chemical resistance among pests. He explained that every insecticide applied to crops exerts evolutionary pressure that pests eventually adapt to, noting that Fall Armyworm has already developed resistance to multiple insecticide classes, much as Tuta absoluta has done across other tropical regions. This forces farmers into a cycle of spraying more frequently and at higher concentrations, which not only raises costs but increases chemical residues in food and contamination in water sources. He identified a second, structural challenge: even where effective agricultural science exists, it frequently fails to reach the smallholder farmers who need it most, since chemical and biological pest-control solutions typically require distribution networks, storage facilities, trained technicians and reliable infrastructure that concentrate benefits around commercial farms near urban centres rather than reaching remote smallholdings.

These combined pressures, Behmanesh said, shaped the thinking behind Sentinel X, Informiton's newly developed pest-control technology. He explained that chemical resistance highlighted what not to build, rather than directly inspiring the solution itself, since introducing a new chemical typically only resets the resistance clock for a limited number of years rather than solving the underlying problem. Of greater concern to him, he said, is the human cost of resistance-driven overuse of chemicals, which increases direct exposure for farmworkers who often apply sprays without adequate protective equipment, a pattern he described as widespread and significantly under-reported in health statistics.

Rather than targeting the pest directly, Behmanesh said Sentinel X works by communicating with the crop itself, using what he described as photonic information exchange to stimulate plants into expressing their own natural chemical defences more strongly and consistently. Because nothing is physically sprayed under this approach, he said the system eliminates applicator exposure, harvest re-entry risks, food residues and agricultural run-off into water sources. He added that because the technology requires no manufacturing, shipping or on-site installation, it could theoretically reach a remote farm in Kaduna with the same consistency as a large commercial estate, provided the farm's location and boundaries have been mapped in advance.

Beyond direct pest control, Behmanesh argued that Sentinel X's broader significance lies in its potential to reshape the wider agricultural value chain. He said the technology is offered at a fixed, predictable cost per hectare agreed before each planting season, unlike conventional agrochemical inputs whose costs tend to rise over time as pest resistance forces farmers to spray more heavily. He suggested that freeing smallholders from recurring input costs could allow many to expand their landholdings and shift toward planning their farms as long-term businesses rather than reacting to recurring crop emergencies.

Behmanesh further argued that the farm-mapping process required to deploy the technology could simultaneously function as a georeferenced farm registry, addressing what he described as a longstanding identification problem underlying Nigeria's agricultural finance sector, where banks and insurers have historically struggled to lend against or underwrite farms they cannot precisely locate or verify. He was careful to note, however, that the technology alone does not resolve broader structural challenges such as poor rural roads, inadequate storage infrastructure or weak market systems, describing its role instead as addressing two specific bottlenecks ,unpredictable crop output and costly recurring input requirements , which he believes could make the rest of the agricultural value chain more attractive to conventional financiers and off-takers.