As a major societal concern, it is imperative to reduce agricultural pollution.
Indeed, to boost the growth of crops and to increase cereal yields, agrochemicals (fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, etc.) are today overused. This negatively impacts the environment: for instance, in the EU, a significant part of water bodies are under pressure from intensive agriculture.
Precision agriculture (PA) can help European agriculture to shift towards more sustainable practices. PA refers to new technological sensing capabilities (ex: battery-powered wireless sensors) in order to remotely collect local relevant parameters (ex: temperature, humidity, pH, etc.) so that variations in conditions within an agricultural field can be assessed. The local parameters retrieved can help growers to take more informed decisions in a timely manner. For example, instead of treating the whole field periodically, growers can use agrochemicals only where and when it is really needed. The promise of PA is hence to produce more while using less chemical inputs.
Nonetheless, deploying large networks of electronic sensing units (nodes) to cover vast fields is challenging. Indeed, batteries offer limited operation lifetime. On one hand, recollecting large quantities of dispersed dysfunctional devices is not an option for the growers. On the other hand, the nodes cannot remain in the soil. The electronic components and batteries they embed are indeed full of hazardous materials and heavy metals. As such, nodes currently in use actually constitute another source of pollution.
To tackle such problems, the GREAT-4PA project aimed at redefining the core electronic components of battery-powered nodes to make them completely eco-friendly. In particular, the project proposed a concrete solution to the problem of the toxic batteries via the development of a power source having the ability to physically disappear after a period of stable operation so that it can it left in the soil after use without environmental impact.
