Please let me know if you are aware of any commercial digital sensor(s) to measure soil nutrients (N, P, K, Mg)?
The sensors are required for a land of 5000 ha. Any ides on numbers of sensors would be an additional help pls?
Dear Manoj Gupta,
What you are looking for doesnot really exist. Although first attempts are made.
You could use proximal soil scanning, e.g. passive gamma, as alternative. See attached example of my work.
regards,
eddie loonstra
There are commercially available resin strips designed to be embedded in soil, retrieved and extracted. The process is conceptually nice because it nutrient binding is diffusion controlled, but selectivity varies between ions, so as loading proceeds some ions can displace others. That is you need to try different contact times. The strips only work with good contact and while the soil moisture is sufficient. Spatial variation is also very large at this scale so you need a large number of such devices to represent an area.
What do you want to monitor and why over so large an area? How uniform is it?
Conventional sampling and analysis approaches are designed to overcome many of the above difficulties but that's not to say they are perfect.
Thanks Paul
I want to monitor soil nutrients on real time basis and wish to automate fertilizer application with the help of precision farming equipments.
Regards,
Manoj
The Horiba range of digital ion meters work quite well, but doesn't provide real time automated service. They are also quite delicate.
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