Dr Sina Behmanesh is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Informiton, an agricultural and biomedical technology company in Leesburg, Virginia, USA. In this interview, he speaks on the disparity between the Nigerian commercial farmer and his American counterpart, and how technology can be used to bridge the gap between farmers’ investment and profit.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing farmers in tropical Africa?
We are locked in a race we cannot win on current terms. Every chemical we deploy applies selection pressure, and the pest evolves. Fall Armyworm has already developed resistance to multiple insecticide classes, and Tuta Absoluta (the pest that affects Tomato) has done the same across the tropics. So, the farmer sprays more often, at higher concentrations, mixing products, and the yield he protects is bought with residues in the food and contamination in the water table. Resistance is not a distant risk. It is the reason a chemical that worked five years ago no longer works today, and it guarantees that any purely chemical strategy has an expiry date.
The second is structural. Even where good science exists, it does not reach the farmer who needs it the most. Chemicals need distribution and cash at the exact moment in the season. Biological controls need production facilities and living organisms kept viable across hundreds of kilometres of bad road.
Equipment needs power, spare parts, trained technicians. So, the tools cluster around commercial farms near cities, and the smallholder, who grows most of Africa’s food, is served last or not at all.
Put those together, and you get the real test any solution must pass. It must be sustainable, meaning it does not degrade in effectiveness the moment the pest adapts and does not poison the soil, the water, or the people.
It must be scalable, meaning it works for a million farms as easily as for ten. It must be broadly accessible, and it must be affordable, meaning the cost per hectare fits inside a smallholder’s actual margin.
How do you compare agricultural practice in the United States to Nigeria’s? How can we catch up?
I want to resist the framing of a race with one finish line, because the two systems are solving different problems.
American agriculture is capital-deep and labour-scarce. A single farmer in Virginia may work two thousand hectares alone, and every part of that system – the he machinery, the credit, the irrigation, the roads, the storage, the extension service, the insurance – is built to substitute capital for hands. Nigerian agriculture is the opposite: labour-rich, capital-scarce and dominated by smallholders working one to five hectares. Those are not the same enterprise at different stages of maturity. They are different enterprises.
Where the real gap sits is not in the intelligence or the effort of the farmer. It is in the layer around him. The Nigerian farmer typically absorbs risk that his American counterpart never sees, because in the United States, the system carries it: crop insurance, forward contracts, subsidized inputs, financing tied to the season rather than the harvest, cold storage, and roads.
So how far is there to go? On yield per hectare, the distance is real, and it is measurable. But I would be careful about assuming the path is the same. The US reached its position over 80 years by building enormous physical infrastructure first. Nigeria does not have to repeat that sequence, and in some ways should not.
Mobile banking here leaped over branch networks entirely. The same logic applies in agriculture: the technologies that will close the gap fastest are the ones that do not require the physical build-out to come first.
Nigeria has crop diversity, climatic range, and a young farming population that most developed systems have lost. American agriculture is efficient but narrow, and increasingly brittle.
You mentioned that chemical that worked five years ago, a pest like the Fall Armyworm is now resistant to this. Was this what gave birth to Sentinel X, the new agricultural technology?
Partly, yes — but resistance told us what not to build, more than it told us what to build. And resistance was only half of the reason.
The logic on resistance was this: Every chemical we spray is a single molecule with a single mode of action, applied from outside the plant. That is the perfect setup for evolution: one target, enormous selection pressure, millions of insects per hectare, several generations per season. The pest only has to solve one puzzle, and it will. So, a new chemical does not fix resistance; it resets the clock and buys you five or eight years before you are standing exactly where you started.
But there is a second cost. When resistance forces a farmer to spray more often, at higher concentrations, mixing products in ways no label ever recommended, the exposure does not stay in the field. It reaches the man carrying the knapsack sprayer, usually without gloves, without a mask, often barefoot, frequently a young person hired. It reaches the woman working the rows behind the sprayer before any re-entry interval has passed.
Acute pesticide poisoning is not a rare event on this continent; it is routine, under-reported, and largely invisible in health statistics because the symptoms are attributed to something else.
The chronic exposures, the neurological effects, the reproductive effects and the long-latency cancers are almost never counted.
So, we are asking farmers to protect their crop by damaging their own bodies, and then to sell that produce to families who have no way of knowing what is on it. That is not a sustainable bargain.
That forced a different question. Not what should we spray? But why does the pest attack this plant at all? And what does the plant itself do about it? Plants are not passive. A crop under attack releases volatile organic compounds, which are its own chemistry, that repel the pest, warn neighbouring plants, and in some cases call in the insect’s natural predators. That system is millions of years old, and the armyworm has not defeated it because it is not one molecule. It is a shifting blend, produced by the plant, in the field, in real time.
So, Sentinel X does not attack the pest. It communicates with the crop. We use photonic information exchange, altering the energy states of photons to create information-laden signals. To stimulate the plant to express those natural defenses more strongly and more consistently than it would alone. The plant does the work. We simply tell it when. Nothing is sprayed, so there is no applicator exposure, no re-entry risk, no residue on the food and no run-off into the water table.
And the last part matters as much as the rest. Because there is nothing to manufacture, ship, store or install, a farm in a remote corner of Kaduna receives exactly the same intervention as a large commercial estate. We need only the farm’s location and boundaries. A ministry with an extension network maps its farms once, and from then on, the signal reaches every mapped farm every season. Resistance, human health, and reach: These are reasons Sentinel X exists.
Beyond the Sentinel X Pest control and Sentinel X Crop booster, how do you see Sentinel X transforming the agricultural value chain vis-a-vis the current practice?
Pest control and yield are what a farmer buys. They are not what change the industry. What changes the industry is what happens to everything downstream once those two things become predictable and clean and once the money the farmer used to burn on inputs stays in his pocket.
For a smallholder, cost is the whole conversation. Today his cash goes into consumables: agrochemicals and fertilizer, priced in dollars. Worse, they are not bought once. He sprays, but the pest returns; as resistance advances, he sprays more often and at higher concentration. That is a recurring bill that rises every year by the logic of evolution itself.
Sentinel X and Sentinel XC are delivered for a fixed, known cost per hectare, agreed before the season begins, with nothing to buy again mid-season and no product to be adulterated, stolen or counterfeited on the way to him. And because there is no manufacturing, no packaging, no shipping in our cost base, that price is structurally lower than any physical input can be.
The consequence is that the farmer ends the season holding money he did not previously keep, and I would argue that is the single most transformative thing we do, more than the yield figure. Most Nigerian smallholders are not small because they lack ambition or land access. They are small because the working capital required per hectare caps how much they dare plant. When that disappears, what returns to the farmer is his own time and attention for spacing, for soil, for water management, for weeding at the right moment, for post-harvest handling, and for the most valuable activity of all, which is thinking about his farm as a business rather than reacting to the emergency in front of him. A farmer who is not fighting fires plans expansions.
Produce that was never sprayed carries no residues, which turns quality from a luxury tier into the default — Nigeria has lost export value over residues before, and the clean route here is also the cheap route. The mapping we require to deliver the technology is itself a georeferenced farm registry, and Nigeria’s agricultural finance problem has always partly been an identification problem: a bank cannot lend against a farm it cannot locate, an insurer cannot underwrite a hectare it cannot verify. Map once, and a population that was financially invisible becomes bankable. And there is no distribution gradient at all — nothing to ship or install means a remote farm in Kaduna receives exactly what a commercial estate receives, at the same moment and the same cost, which changes who is worth aggregating and therefore where processing and offtake can reach.
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