Healthy soil doesn’t only put food on our plates. It can also foster ecosystems, sustain agriculture for generations and fight climate change by trapping...
Soil in Formation plans to market Prasad’s sensors as tools for governments and other organizations to incentivize sustainable agriculture, making the sensors free to most farmers.Soil health, like human health, is multifaceted and can be measured in many ways. Measures of soil health include availability of nutrients for plants, risk of pesticides and other contaminants leaching into nearby freshwater, and how many earthworms are in the ground.
Prasad’s sensors each have unique chemical coatings. When a small electrical shock is applied, soil reacts with the coatings in a way that allows each to measure different facets of soil health. In the current design, users need to download the data directly from the chip, but Prasad hopes to develop a wireless version to streamline the process. Soil in Formation is working on a dashboard to contextualize the data and help farmers understand how to act on it.
Other collaborators at Texas A&M AgriLife have tested the sensors for accuracy against standard lab test results.According to Prasad and Dhamu, sensors on the UTD campus, as well as in eastern Texas and Costa Rica, have performed very well, demonstrating that they can work across climates and soil types.
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