Optical Sensing Of Soil Nutrients For 'Smart Farming'
Geography and You|May/June 2017

Over the years, chemical fertilisers have been applied to soil in order to increase their fertility. However over or under application of fertilisers can damage the crop yield and also cause serious ecological concerns. Soil testing thus acquires an important place in farming, specifically in site specific crop management. Non-destructive in-situ measurements of soil nutrients with cost effective optical sensing methods can help in determining and monitoring the nutrient levels in the soil.

Subra Mukherjee and Shakuntala Laskar
Optical Sensing Of Soil Nutrients For 'Smart Farming'

With an ever increasing population, the demand for crop production has also increased exponentially in the past few years. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, global food demand will be 70 per cent more in 2050 than it was in 2006 (FAO, 2009). This has imposed enormous challenges on the agricultural sector to find ways to optimise the yield while addressing barriers such as limited land and water supply, ecological concerns, health issues and climatic changes. These issues has led to the concept of smart farming also known as precision agriculture—an information intensive management strategy where production inputs such as fertilisers are matched with the site specific needs of the crops. Characterisation of soil nutrients is an integral part of the diagnosis of soil quality with reference to its fertility. Conventional chemical and laboratory techniques are labourintensive, time consuming and very expensive. So, there is an urgent need for smart farming techniques such as precision agriculture.

Soil nutrients are vital for plant growth. Deficiency as well as excess of these nutrients may impede productivity. Chemical fertilisers are added to soil to meet up the nutrient requirements of plants. However, the uncontrolled addition of these substances can cause severe environmental hazards such as surface and ground water pollution and also affect the quality of the crop (Lehmann and Grisel, 2014). As such, a lot of attention has been focused in this area in recent years, particularly in precision agriculture and site specific management procedures for obtaining localised ‘on the go’ measurement of nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium (K) in any soil. These components represent the three most important nutrients in agriculture and are the prime ingredients in almost all fertilisers.

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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May/June 2017 من Geography and You.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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