REAL LIFE NEWS: PLOUGH SENSORS INTO YOUR FIELD
by Hazed
Continuing my trawl through back issues of New Scientist magazine, I have reached February (hooray, I’m only three months behind now) where I read that a field in Cheshire, England, is about to be ploughed and sown not just with seeds, but with sensors.
The electronics will measure soil temperature and moisture content, and send the data wirelessly to the surface so that farmers can use it to avoid under- or over-irrigating the crops.
The sensors, which are cheap and low-powered, can be left in the ground for years without maintenance. They use RFID to communicate with a reader that is mounted on a tractor which “harvests” the data as it moves over each node.
This system is being tested by the University of Manchester, UK, but it’s not the only one being developed: a team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is making a large-scale version of the system.
These systems will be vital to save water in dry conditions – the UNL team leader predicts, “30-40% water savings are possible without affecting yields.”
If this system proves to be a success I predict a new version of the old hymn: We plough the fields and scatter the good electronics on the land…
