Have you heard of smartprobe? This tech darling allows farmers to use their phones to improve soil quality. As?
The American company Terraform Tillage presented the world with a revolutionary new product – the SmartProbe system! Thanks to it, farmers around the world can connect their smartphones to any brand of soil compaction tester (so-called penetrometer). The latter is particularly important because it can determine the texture, quality, but also the level of moisture in the soil. Farmers can thus measure their fields just before plowing. Thanks to this, they know at what depth the compacted soil is located and what to do to make plowing effective.
The author of the video – Farm Bot – will tell you more about compacted soil. You can find everything on the channel YouTube.com.
Source: Youtube
Compacted soil detector
Compacted soil is a big problem for farmers. It is mostly caused by insufficient or bad processing of fields. Misuse of heavy mechanics is also a problem. “Compacted soil is characterized by the fact that it is harder, poorly aerated and does not pass much water. This causes the crop roots to not be able to develop and receive enough nutrition. Then the plants don’t grow, they don’t give birth, and farmers are at risk of financial collapse,” says the expert. Therefore, the novelty from Terraform Tillage is a new hope for crop growers, how to map the quality of the soil and thereby influence the future harvest.
Bad and good places to grow
“With SmartProbe, farmers can map their entire fields. “This function is especially important when sowing is planned. Thanks to the map, the farmer knows in which part of the field the soil is high-quality and fertile… And in which, on the contrary, it needs better aeration, nutrition and care,” explains the expert. It is interesting that the plants themselves can be a certain detector of compacted soil. At least according to scientists…
Plants and their “Ethylene”
The team of researchers came up with the fact that some types of plants can recognize compacted soil in time. For this, they do not use “mechanical sensors” (something like touch), but the gaseous hormone ethylene. “If the plant detects that the soil is too hard, the growth of the root in length stops, but its strengthening at the tip is encouraged,” says the expert, explaining why in one breath. “Cells in the root tip produce ethylene. If the soil is saturated, the gas will disappear. In the opposite situation, ethylene accumulates and the plant root continues to thicken.
The mutants are in the lead so far!
The tests showed different resistance of plants to compacted soil. While the crossbred plants were somehow able to “handle” the hard and impermeable soil, the genetically “normal” varieties chose rather to escape. They simply tried to stretch their roots as far as possible to reach places where the soil is softer and more fertile. Further research is still being worked on. But maybe in the future crops will appear that will bear fruit regardless of the quality of the soil. But for now it’s in the stars.
Sources: https://uroda.cz, https://ct24.ceskatelevize.cz
