A Novel Soil Monitoring System securing Soil Quality for farmers utilizing advanced sensors

Agriculture is the sector most affected by the climate change and is extremely vulnerable. Higher temperatures reduce crop yields which will threaten global food security. Climate-smart agriculture will help to ensure food security and boost productivity. Focus on developing innovations will decrease the environmental impact on farming, and the key will be good management practices. Our project secures that monitoring farmers’ soils will enable them to take correct measures for maximizing yields. However, a study (2021) shows that only 4% of the surveyed farmers have equipment to evaluate essential soil parameters. Cost is apparently not the most important obstacle, but rather access to solutions that are easy to use and with practical data collection, processing and data transfer. Over 80% of the farmers want to purchase monitoring equipment that would enable optimizing their cultivation technology. An extensive SoA study shows that the current market cannot offer solutions that meet farmers’ expectations and neither any complete systems where farmers can get full overview over their soil quality and also get unique advice for corrective measures. The SenSoilQ project aims at developing a novel and durable easy-to-use Soil Monitoring System enabling farmers to monitor and improve their soil quality. The system will consist of a hardware (HW) and software (SW) part. The HW part consists of two earth rods and a “Smart Sensor Hub” (SSH) that will contain air monitoring sensors and a GNSS positioning module. One earth rod developed by this project will have sensors for monitoring CO2, CH4 and NO3 in soil on 3 different depths. Another commercially provided earth rod will monitor soil humidity, temperature and pH. The earth rods will through the SSH unit send data to SoilEssentials advanced KORE platform where they will be treated and result in concrete reports and action plans that are presented to farmers’ mobile devices through 7Sense’s existing SW system.