3 days ago
From the stars to the soil... agtech taking inspiration from Nasa
There are at least two places where soil sampling is very important. On farms, and on planets where exploratory spacecraft from Earth touch down.
So it's no surprise that space technology is now being adapted for farming purposes.
Many inventions we now take for granted stemmed from space travel. Cameras astronauts used to take pictures of the Earth have been adapted for smartphones, according to Nasa, America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Home air purifiers and cordless power tools use space technology.
Methods used to keep food stable and healthy for astronauts, weeks after its production, are now used in food safety.
GPS receivers for self-guided tractors have depended on Nasa's global network of ground stations.
Water filtration, microchips, crash helmets, and scratch-proof spectacle lenses have all been perfected with the help of space research breakthroughs.
Now, soil testing may be revolutionised with the help of technology used on the six Rover robots, which have been landed on Mars, to explore the planet.
For soil testing, the robots lasered rocks and soils on Mars, causing them to emit a light spectrum which a sensor instantly analysed, to determine the composition of the material.
Now, in agriculture, a version of this technology can reveal the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other essential elements present in the soil.
It is being developed by a California company called TerraBlaster.
Soil testing is an area ripe for game-changing technology. It still largely depends on manually taking 10 soil samples for every two and a half acres (accompanied by GPS co-ordinates, one of the few modern refinements), and sending the samples off for analysis in laboratories. But it has to be done.
Without a soil test, not enough or too much fertiliser is likely to be applied, and crop potential lost, or pollution caused by excess fertiliser entering groundwater or streams.
With global fertiliser use costing farmers up to €200bn a year, excess fertiliser is an expensive mistake.
TerraBlaster aims to prevent this with a system that analyses in real-time when and where to apply fertiliser.
The agricultural version of the space-age technology is likely to be an ATV or tractor dragging a robust sensor through the soil, which measures nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, linked to computers and GPS in order to produce a soil map.
Further along in the development of the system, real-time soil testing offers the prospect of a machine simultaneously analysing the soil and spreading fertiliser, adjusting the spreading volume as the analysis changes.
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