21st Century Green Farming with Wireless Soil Sensors
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 10.13.08
Wireless Soil Sensors^ to Improve Farming
Researchers at Iowa State University have developed wireless soil sensors that could bring agriculture in the information age (more than it already is) and make farming much more efficient.
The goal would be to put these sensors about 1 foot underground in a grid pattern (80 to 160 feet apart) and have them gather information about how water moves through a field, soil moisture, help understand the carbon and nitrogen cycles within soils, which nutrients are present or missing, soil temperature, etc. Read on for more details.
The Goldilocks Approach
Farmers have an incentive to put too much of something in a field rather than too little. Too much water, too much fertilizer, etc. Better have some of it wasted rather than affect yields...
But with precise information on a field from sensors, they would be able to get it "just right", thus reducing their water/fertilizer/etc costs without being afraid of affecting yields. They could also develop better models to predict in advance crop growth and yields, reducing the number of bad surprises.
"A challenge of precision agriculture is collecting data at a high enough resolution that you can make good decisions," [Stuart Birrell, an Iowa State associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering,] said. "These sensors would provide very high resolution data for producers and researchers. They would give us another data layer to explain differences in yield and help us make management decisions."
The wireless soil sensors project is supported by a three-year, $239,999 grant from the National Science Foundation. They are not production ready yet, but that's the goal...
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Then you can just push a button and everything is fixed.
so when did putting wires, computers, and batteries underground that will undoubtedly need to be replaced every so often be construed as an efficiency building process. Sounds pretty complicated to me, not to mention the need for a computer to view the data, and then the time needed to parse the data... to me it seems like knowing your land and the growing process of plants and how they relate to the seasons and the soil would be more important. You know...things that farmers have been able to do for ages...
Glenn, I think you raise a good question, but that your answer is off.
Farming is very energy and chemical intensive. If some small sensors (could almost be RFID when they are production ready) can help avoid using fertilizer (which is made with natural gas), water (which is scarce), or using machinery when it's not necessary, that's going to save a lot more for the environment than whatever was used to make these small sensors.
You mention farmers not having to worry about the water/fertilizer/etc affecting yields. That's NEGATIVELY affecting yields, as affecting yields(positively) is the point of applying fertilizer and watering crops.
Hi
Its very interessting Thread.
Thx
This is a great idea - think how imprecise adding liquids to a field can be and then how much total farm land exists in the world. I'm excited to see the results of this data, as well as a more affordable implementation.
ok..I guess I was referring to farmers who do not use chemical fertilizers and rely on either a local tributary, or simply rain for irrigation... but, to keep this conversation going, say we use these devices and we increase our yield 10 fold while reducing resource waste...then what? Does our population continue to explode at an alarming rate because we again have the resources to support this explosion? Does land then become increasingly scarce because of this population explosion? Do resources again become scarce because of this explosion? Do we have to, again, find new technologies to further increase efficiency to then support this explosion thus leading to an even greater population explosion which will then leave us no choice but to colonize another planet? So I guess I can phase these questions into one question. What happens when we use modern technology to fix things that aren't broken? Farming at it's core, which I will say is sustainable organic farming, is far from being broke. The population is huge and resources are scarce, in relation to the massive population. We, as a society, don't like to see people die, but die they will, whether it be today or tomorrow, so what do we do?
Glenn—
I agree with you about sustainable organic agriculture being the non-broken core of farming. This is an example of how we have—at hand—everything we need to fix all of our biggest problems. We just don't implement many of these solutions at the scale needed for various silly reasons.
The first thing I thought when reading this was that burying these things only 1 ft down assumes either a no-till system or a mechanical tillage system. Personally I don't think no-till works for everything—it seems especially suited to grains and such IMHO—and mechanical (with machines) tillage is (again IMHO) unsustainable. If you must till, you need to do it deeper than most farms currently do to allow roots to penetrate deeper.