Increasingly limited land and water resources have spurred the development of precision agriculture, which uses remote sensing technology to monitor air and soil environmental data in real time to help optimize crop yields. Maximizing the sustainability of such technologies is critical to properly manage the environment and reduce costs.
Now, in a study recently published in the journal Advanced Sustainable Systems, researchers at Osaka University have developed a wireless soil moisture sensing technology that is largely biodegradable. This work is an important milestone in addressing remaining technical bottlenecks in precision agriculture, such as the safe disposal of used sensor equipment.
As the global population continues to grow, optimizing agricultural yields and minimizing land and water use is essential. Precision agriculture aims to address these conflicting needs by using sensor networks to collect environmental information so that resources can be appropriately allocated to farmland when and where they are needed.
Drones and satellites can collect a wealth of information, but they are not ideal for determining soil moisture and moisture levels. For optimal data collection, moisture measuring devices should be installed on the ground at a high density. If the sensor is not biodegradable, it must be collected at the end of its life, which can be labor intensive and impractical. Achieving electronic functionality and biodegradability in one technology is the goal of the current work.
“Our system includes multiple sensors, a wireless power supply, and a thermal imaging camera to collect and transmit sensing and location data,” explains Takaaki Kasuga, lead author of the study. “The components in the soil are mostly environmentally friendly and consist of nanopaper. substrate, natural wax protective coating, carbon heater and tin conductor wire.”
The technology is based on the fact that the efficiency of wireless energy transfer to the sensor corresponds to the temperature of the sensor heater and the humidity of the surrounding soil. For example, when optimizing sensor position and angle on smooth soil, increasing soil moisture from 5% to 30% reduces transmission efficiency from ~46% to ~3%. The thermal imaging camera then captures images of the area to simultaneously collect soil moisture and sensor location data. At the end of the harvest season, the sensors can be buried in the soil to biodegrade.
“We successfully imaged areas with insufficient soil moisture using 12 sensors in a 0.4 x 0.6 meter demonstration field,” Kasuga said. “As a result, our system can handle the high sensor density needed for precision agriculture.”
This work has the potential to optimize precision agriculture in an increasingly resource-constrained world. Maximizing the effectiveness of the researchers’ technology under non-ideal conditions, such as poor sensor placement and slope angles on coarse soils and perhaps other indicators of the soil environment beyond soil moisture levels, could lead to widespread use of the technology by the global agricultural community.
Post time: Apr-30-2024