Smart sensors for agriculture

We often don’t see them, but our lives are full of sensors. They’re in our cars, our phones, our farm fields, and our machines.

Laurie Bedord is the Advanced Technology Editor of Successful Farming Magazine. She says smart sensors track everything on farmers’ land, from water to soil pH to nutrients. And experts are constantly improving this technology. Bedord says, for example, we are now able to look at a crop and see what that crop specifically needs.

“I attended the AgBot challenge in Indiana last summer, and there were some incredible inventors there who invented weed and feed robots,” Bedord says. “It had sensors on it that could see where weeds were and kill those weeds. Or it looked at the plant to see what it needed, did it need a little more food? And the sensor technology would give the plant the nutrition it needed.”

The price of sensors is also coming down. In 2004, they cost $1.38 each. That may not sound like a lot, but when you have thousands of sensors in these machines, it adds up quickly.

“By 2020, it is projected that these sensors will cost only 38 cents per sensor. If these predictions come true, it will become very affordable to put this technology on machines,” Bedord says. “And it’s exciting to see a fully autonomous tractor out in the field planting, harvesting, and it’s really going to change the way we farm in the future.”

Bedord says the next revolution will be the development of algorithms that help farmers make decisions based on the information that sensors tell them.