Book Description

"Soil physical characteristics are a major indicator of soil fertility and play a key role in agricultural management decisions. Compacted soils can impact plant growth and affect the workability of the soil for tillage operations. Precision agriculture seeks to detect soil zones with similar characteristics and apply management practices specific to those zones. As precision agriculture technologies are more widely adopted across the globe, collection of the data to drive these control systems is becoming increasingly required. Commercially, only a few devices are directed at measuring soil physical properties. Even fewer attempt to apply an automated principle to the collection of data, reducing the time and labour costs associated with conventional soil data gathering. This research seeks to fill this gap by developing a sensor system to directly measure soil physical properties when combined with an automated vehicle, such as Bearcub 24 (Ztractor, Inc, Palo Alto, CA, USA), or equivalent. The sensor system features a cone penetrometer with separate cone and shaft measurements, an air permeameter and CO2 sensor, and a generic apparent electrical conductivity, volumetric water content, and temperature sensor. Testing of the sensor system on a Gator vehicle resulted in several performance issues due to the vehicle’s light suspension and exhaust fumes. The cone penetrometer demonstrated the capability of generating detailed soil profiles and the combined system was able of estimate soil bulk density with reasonable confidence. Further development of the soil sensor system and autonomous electric tractor will allow for dependable measurements of soil physical properties without human involvement, saving time and money while improving the efficacy of proximal soil sensing"--