Keeping Nitrogen Where the Crop Needs It | NFLOW brings rainfall, terrain and soil intelligence into nitrogen management.

mYields' ambition is to help farms protect and rejuvenate their soils by building a high-resolution understanding of how soil, water, terrain and nutrients interact across agricultural fields. NFLOW is an important building block in this ambition, bringing nitrogen topography and rainfall-driven nutrient movement into practical farm management.

Developing a nitrogen topography-driven correction model has been one of mYields' key technology objectives. Building on earlier developments such as DRONATION, and now the committed backend and API development of NFLOW, mYields is working toward a high-resolution soil monitoring and agronomical system that can help farms protect their soils from erosion and maintain or rebuild their productive potential under the rapidly changing environmental conditions facing European agriculture.

NFLOW focuses on one particularly important part of this challenge: what happens to nitrogen after it has been applied to a field?

A nitrogen application map describes where nitrogen is intended to go. But rainfall, terrain and soil conditions can change that outcome.

NFLOW combines Copernicus Earth Observation data, terrain and rainfall information, and European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC) soil layers to model how nitrogen can move through a field following rainfall events. The soil information helps the system better understand the hydrological characteristics of different parts of the field and how water movement can influence nutrient redistribution.

The objective is to distinguish between two important effects.

• When nitrogen leaves the field, it is a clear loss

  NFLOW identifies areas where rainfall-driven movement can increase the risk of nitrogen leaving the field boundary. The correction model can respond by adjusting nitrogen rates around affected field boundaries, helping to minimise potential losses while compensating for expected movement.

  
  

• When nitrogen moves within the field, the problem is different

  Nitrogen can remain inside the field but move away from the location where it was originally intended to be utilised.

  This is particularly relevant in areas strongly affected by topography and slope. The NFLOW test maps show parts of fields where modelled nitrogen levels are more than 30% below the original planned level, including high-slope and topographically exposed areas.

  The correction model is designed to compensate for this redistribution, helping ensure that areas affected by water-driven movement can still receive their intended nitrogen supply.

  In this way, NFLOW is not simply looking for nitrogen that has disappeared. It is looking at the complete nitrogen movement within the field and beyond its boundary.

Showing farmers the value before correction

A key part of NFLOW's development is giving farmers a way to understand the potential value of a correction before ordering a revised nitrogen application map.

NFLOW can calculate the original nitrogen plan, simulate different rainfall scenarios, quantify nitrogen leaving the field and describe the total nitrogen movement relative to its intended point of utilisation.

This creates a practical decision point for the farmer:

How much nitrogen has moved? Where has it moved? How much has left the field? And is correcting the application worth doing?

Rather than asking farmers to purchase another prescription map simply because a model identifies a potential issue, NFLOW aims to first quantify the potential impact and savings. The farmer can then decide whether a correction provides sufficient value to justify the next step.

This farmer-first approach is central to the development of NFLOW as a digital agricultural service.

From NFLOW technology to a scalable agricultural service

The current development phase is supported by the FIERCE programme, which is helping mYields move NFLOW from its existing functional prototype toward a scalable, cloud-based service.

The project brings together complementary expertise:

• mYields leads the NFLOW agronomic model, nitrogen optimisation methodology and Earth Observation analytics.

• Building Blocks supports the cloud architecture, backend deployment, API implementation, security and technical infrastructure.

• OneSoil supports integration with a Farm Management System, including the connection of NFLOW through its API, prescription-map workflows and visualisation.

• Startup Nation Finland (SNF) supports farmer and stakeholder validation, customer discovery, value proposition development and identification of potential commercial partners.

The aim is to make NFLOW an interoperable optimisation service, rather than another standalone agricultural application. The cloud API will allow the technology to connect with existing digital farming platforms and deliver its analysis within workflows farmers and agronomists already use.

Validation with farmers

The project will combine technical development with commercial and agricultural validation.

mYields and its partners plan to engage 10–20 farms in pilot and validation activities, alongside interviews with farmers, agronomists and other agricultural stakeholders.

The validation will focus not only on whether NFLOW can technically model nitrogen movement, but whether the information it provides is useful for real farm decisions.

A central question will be whether NFLOW can give farmers sufficient information about potential nitrogen movement, field-boundary losses and the economic value of correction before they commit to ordering a revised application map.

The project will also assess the environmental effects of the optimisation through simulation-based comparisons between existing nitrogen plans and NFLOW-corrected scenarios.

The project has established targets around reducing estimated nitrogen losses and over-application and improving nitrogen-use efficiency. These are project targets to be assessed through the planned modelling and validation, rather than results already claimed by the technology.

A building block for the future of soil monitoring

NFLOW begins with nitrogen, but mYields' ambition extends beyond nitrogen optimisation.

By combining Earth Observation, soil data, terrain modelling, rainfall simulation and agronomic models, mYields is building toward a system capable of monitoring agricultural soils at high resolution and understanding how environmental events affect their productive potential.

The long-term objective is to help farms protect soil from erosion, maintain its capacity to retain water and nutrients, and progressively rebuild soil health, even as European agricultural conditions become more challenging.

NFLOW is one step toward that vision: turning the movement of water, soil and nutrients into information that farmers can use to protect their fields and make better decisions.