John Deere and Yara have joined forces to launch a partnership that will combine Yara’s agronomic expertise with John Deere’s precision technology and advanced machinery.
The partnership will enable farmers to increase yields and optimize fertilizer use. The advanced connectivity between the John Deere Operations Center and Yara’s Atfarm digital platform will provide farmers with tailored crop nutrition recommendations rooted in agronomic precision to ensure crops receive the right amount of nutrients where and when needed.
The Atfarm platform uses Yara’s proprietary optimized index, which enables farmers to monitor the biomass development of their crops and nitrogen uptake throughout the season and access field specific variable rate application maps. This data can be seamlessly shared as a WorkPlan with the John Deere Operations Center. Farmers can add operational details and wirelessly synchronize the plans, including prescriptions, to any machine featuring the John Deere Gen4 or G5 Display.
The new connectivity will be piloted from spring 2024 to a group of farmers in Germany, France and the UK. In addition, Yara and John Deere will continue to collaborate on additional opportunities to further improve nutrient use efficiency for farmers. ●
Researchers from Osaka University have developed a wirelessly powered soil moisture sensing technology that is largely biodegradable. The study was recently published in Advanced Sustainable Systems.
This work is an important milestone in removing the remaining technical bottlenecks in precision agriculture, such as the safe disposal of used sensor devices.
With an increasing global population, it is imperative to optimize agricultural output yet minimize land and water use. Precision agriculture aims to meet these conflicting needs by using sensor networks to gather environmental information for properly allocating resources to cropland when and where these resources are needed.
Drones and satellites can capture much information but are not ideal for deducing humidity and soil moisture levels. For optimum data collection, moisture sensing devices must be installed at ground level at high density. If the sensors are not biodegradable, they must be collected at the end of their service life, which can be labour-intensive, rendering them impractical. Achieving both electronic functionality and biodegradability in one technology is the goal of the present work.
"Our system comprises several sensors, a wireless power supply, and a thermal camera for acquiring and transmitting sensing and location data," explained Takaaki Kasuga, lead author of the study. “The in-soil components are largely ecofriendly; composed of a nanopaper substrate, a natural wax protective coating, a carbon heater, and tin conductive lines.”
The basis of the technology is that the efficiency of wireless power transmission to the sensor corresponds to the temperature of the sensor's heater and the moisture content of the surrounding soil. For example, at optimized sensor positions and angles on smooth soil, increasing the soil moisture content from five percent to 30 percent decreases the transmission efficiency from ~46 percent to ~three percent. A thermal camera then captures images of the area to simultaneously collect soil moisture-content data and sensor location data. At the end of the crop season, the sensors can be tilled into the soil for biodegradation.
"We have successfully visualized areas of soil moisture deficit by using 12 sensors in a 0.4-metre by 0.6-metre demonstration field," said Kasuga. “Thus, our system works at
the high sensor densities needed for precision agriculture.”
The researcher added this work has the potential to optimize precision agriculture for an increasingly resource-limited world. Maximizing the performance of the researchers' technology under nonideal conditions (such as irregular sensor positions and angles on rough soil), and possibly for other soil environmental metrics besides soil moisture levels, might facilitate widespread adoption by the global agricultural community. ●
Proposed sensing system. Overview of the proposed sensing system with degradable sensor devices. b) When power is wirelessly supplied to the degradable sensor devices placed on the soil, the device heaters activate. The sensing location is determined from the hotspot location, and the temperature of the heater varies with the soil moisture content; thus, the soil moisture content is measured from the hotspot temperature. The degradable sensor devices are tilled into the soil after use. Subsequently, fertilizer components in the substrate of the sensor device are released into the soil, stimulating crop growth. CREDIT: 2023 Kasuga et al., Wirelessly powered sensing fertilizer for precision and sustainable agriculture. Advanced Sustainable Systems
