Among the unsustainability factors in agriculture, the overuse of chemical fertilisers in agriculture has a negative environmental impact, specifically, losses of nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P) to the aquatic environment and an estimated 18% of land is affected by N and P contamination. However, these compounds, either provided by organic or chemical fertilisers, are needed to replace nutrients removed during farming (crops, grass) and to increase productivity. Innovative technologies for smart agriculture will play an increasing role in monitoring farming conditions and will definitively make a positive change by enhancing the effectiveness of fertilisation while minimising the environmental impact, thus helping the farmers answer the “Farm-to-Fork” ambitions regarding nutrient losses and fertiliser use.
SARMENTI developed an Electronic Smart System (ESS) connected to the IoT that helps the farmer monitor soil nutrients that have a direct impact on plant growth, on agricultural production, and on the farmer’s income. The system also monitors environment parameters, i.e. temperature, humidity, and gaseous emissions from fertilised soils arising from microbial interactions between added fertilisers, manures and soil organic matter. The SARMENTI project contributes to the GreenDeal strategy, especially on the farm-to-fork objectives related to nutrient losses and fertiliser use.
SARMENTI addressed the following key challenges:
- Improve selectivity, sensitivity, precision and fabrication cost of existing state-of-the-art sensors, while maintaining their functionality for a long period of use either in the soil or in the air. The partners bring to the project different cutting-edge electrochemical sensors (nanowire and potentiometric) sensitive to the concentration of soil nutrients in a liquid. They also bring environmental sensors, especially to measure the concentration of gases released in the bio-chemical cycle of natural manure. These sensors require advances to enable real time in situ soil nutrients analysis.
- Integrate some sensors in a multi-sensor frontend modules able to monitor different nutrients or environmental parameters and placed for long periods of time (ideally the whole crop duration) in difficult outdoor conditions and even buried in the case of the Soil Probe;
- Develop an appropriate packaging to increase the lifetime of the sensors, to efficiently sample the soil moisture or the surrounding air and decrease the system power consumption;
- Guarantee the integrity of electronic components and data against attempts to bring down or take advantage of the system in an unauthorized manner, by the development of a secure IoT node and its integration with secure connectivity.
By addressing these challenges, SARMENTI developed a real-time and in situ, easy-to-access, connected and cost-effective system for soil nutrients sensing (incl. N and P) that, for the first time, provided real time understanding of temporal changing soil conditions and permited precise dosing of agro-chemicals, leading to substantial improvement in fertilisation (“4R strategy”). This system complements existing spectroscopy solutions and provides decision support to the farmers regarding fertilisation thus providing farming stakeholders with the technology to conform with EU policies, such as, the Nitrates (91/676/EEC) and water frameworks (2000/60/EC) directives. The SARMENTI system also monitors different gases having health and environmental impacts, making the farmer aware of the current gaseous emissions on his land.
