Four UF ABE students were bestowed the Commission of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (CIGR) Award, garnering international recognition. Each year, CIGR recognizes leadership, innovation and collaboration in student design projects worldwide. Ethan Lantzy, Nicholas Manco, Sarah Laboda and Quinn White developed the Fertigation Visualization and Efficiency Tool (FEVT), an extension of their 2025 senior design project taught by Dr. Ziynet Boz and irrigation and drainage engineering design project taught by Dr. Richard Scholtz. Their project won the Joe Collins II Design Competition in 2025, and they continued to develop their project to submit to CIGR.

The FEVT was used to model and visualize fertilizer distribution in fertigation systems. Fertigation is a practice in which farmers inject liquid fertilizer into an irrigation system to apply fertilizer broadly. The drawback to this practice is that fertilizer can be distributed unevenly- some areas of fields may receive excess fertilizer, while other areas receive less than required. The discrepancy negatively affects crop production, as neither scenario supports healthy crop growth.

The students worked to develop a model and app to address these issues and developed the FEVT app to help visualize fertigation imbalances and test design scenarios that could be more effective. The overall objective is to design better fertigation systems to improve crop yield and reduce excess water/fertilizer usage. The UF group was the only student group from the United States to receive the 2026 CIGR award.

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