Using satellites, drones, and AI for more sustainable and efficient agriculture
Piotr Lazarek, a fourth-year Penn Engineering and Wharton student from Pawłowice, Poland, won the 2025 President’s Sustainability Prize for Nirby, a real-time farmland management system addressing inefficiencies in fertilizer usage.
Piotr Lazarek, a dual-degree fourth-year student in Penn’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology (M&T), is unflaggingly driven by the question of how farmers can reduce fertilizer application, thereby reducing both costs and the agricultural carbon footprint. He founded Nirby, a real-time farmland management platform that has been piloted by more than 200 European farmers. The startup also has built an autonomous drone system for real-time soil testing that is patent pending in more than 15 countries, including the United States.
The project has been awarded the 2025 President’s Sustainability Prize, created to support students who have ambitious proposals for post-graduation environmental projects and are committed to making a positive, lasting difference in the world. Each project receives $100,000 in implementation costs plus a $50,000 living stipend per team member.
“The President’s Sustainability Prize and the President’s Innovation Prize have been a dream of mine since freshman year,” says Lazarek, an international student from Poland. “I’m grateful for all the support, mentorship, and opportunity that Penn has given me.”
“Piotr and Nirby have created an innovative and easy-to-adopt farmland management system,” Babin says. “The integration of licensed government satellite data, proprietary real-time soil testing, and data analytics provides farmers with automated fertilizer optimization to save money and avoid the environmental impact of fertilizer run-off.”
Streamlining agrotechnology
Lazarek says that in many conversations with farmers, he kept hearing about how they juggle dozens of discrete agricultural applications: one for inventory management, one for satellite analysis, one for precise agrotechnical treatments, and so on.
“We realized that everything in this space is so disconnected,” he says. “Companies are developing products—very specific solutions to only a very small spectrum of the entire problem. What we wanted to build was a full system that allows them to integrate everything within a single platform.”
Lazarek says Nirby is working at the intersection of mechanical engineering, drone development, computer science, artificial intelligence, and optics to answer the fundamental questions of where, why, and how.
“We use satellite imagery from the European Space Agency to identify where inefficiencies are on the fields, then we deploy our autonomous drones that land at predetermined test points—guided by the satellite data— and test soil properties in real-time to identify why the inefficiencies have occurred,” he says. “Finally, we generate precise application maps for fertilizers to tell farmers how to optimize their production.”
Lazarek says a prototype drone for soil testing has undergone multiple iterations, based on feedback from customers. He describes it as “a combination of a flying laboratory and a drilling platform,” containing a spectrometer with a proprietary optical system to perform soil spectroscopy, the measurement of light absorption to detect the chemical composition of soil. Nirby uses machine learning algorithms to determine key soil properties—such as nitrogen levels—and combines that with productivity insights from satellite data to create the most efficient fertilization plans.
“By understanding why low-productivity areas perform poorly and why high-productivity areas thrive, we can provide farmers with actionable insights,” Lazarek says. “We enable application of the exact types and amounts of fertilizers needed to improve productivity of underperforming zones and avoid overfertilization in high-productivity zones.”
He says farmers just need to insert application maps into tractors equipped with fertilizer spreaders or sprayers, which then automatically adjust dosages of fertilizers in each zone of the field.
From Poland to Penn, a persistent vision
Lazarek grew up in Pawłowice, a mining village in southern Poland. His mother is a teacher and his father an engineer. “Growing up with an engineer dad means a lot of things, but most importantly, it means that you develop a love for building things around the same age you start walking,” he says. For years, he spent a lot of time tinkering in a garage full of his dad's contraptions. Fascinated by NASA documentaries, at age 16 he built a rover with a dream of one day testing soil on Mars.
Around that time, Lazarek says, he heard a story in his chemistry class about a nearby farm that suffered crop failure due to high levels of aluminum in the soil. He started asking his teacher questions about what happened and learned that farmers didn’t perform laboratory soil testing because it’s time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive.
Lazarek says he realized that his Mars rover would never land on Mars, but maybe he could help local farmers. Working with a team of developers and engineers from Poland, he shifted from focusing on the Red Planet to the Blue Planet.
He continued working on the project as he moved to London for secondary school and began applying to universities, initially thinking he would study engineering. But then he read about the M&T Program, a dual-degree program in the Wharton School and Penn Engineering. He shifted from solely being an engineer to also being an entrepreneur.
“People say that this project changed my life, but they get it wrong. This project is my life,” Lazarek says.
“For a long time, I was afraid of dreaming big,” Lazarek says, but he clearly remembers his parents telling him over and over that anything is possible if he works hard enough. “Receiving the President’s Sustainability Prize made me realize they were right.”
Nirby has won more than 16 business competitions and raised more than $450,000 in non-equity funding. The startup’s team members are now preparing for their first investment round.
But “the most important thing so far has been the mentorship,” Lazarek says, citing Babin and M&T program director Gad Allon. “When I joined Penn, I wasn’t expecting that it’ll be so easy to reach out to world-class experts and leading minds in their fields,” he says. “At Penn I can get the best possible help in the world, and I’m extremely grateful for it.”
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