Proximal Soil Moisture Sensing for Real-Time Water Delivery Control: Exploratory Study over a Potato Farm

New sensing technologies are at the cusp of providing state-of-the-art infrastructure to precisely monitor crop water requirements spatially so as to optimize irrigation scheduling and agricultural productivity. This project aimed to develop a new smart irrigation system that uses an L-band radiometer in conjunction with an irrigation boom, allowing for a precision water delivery system using derived high-resolution soil moisture information. A potato farm was selected due to its sensitivity to water and an existing irrigation system where the radiometer could be mounted. A field experiment was conducted to capture the soil moisture variation across the farm using the radiometer. A greenhouse trial was also conducted to mimic the actual growth of potatoes by controlling the soil moisture and exploring the impact on their growth. It was found that 0.3 cm³/cm³ was the optimal moisture level in terms of productivity. Moreover, it was demonstrated that on-farm soil moisture maps could be generated with an RMSE of 0.044 cm³/cm³. It is anticipated that through such technology, a real-time watering map will be generated, which will then be passed to the irrigation software to adjust the rate of each nozzle to meet the requirements without under- or over-watering.