Compostable crop sensors target sustainable farm monitoring

The £1.8m international collaboration, called Transient Electronics for Sustainable ICT in Digital Agriculture, will feature researchers from Canada, Finland, Poland and Switzerland alongside the Glasgow academics. Over the next three years, the project will explore the development of a modular sensor system for crop monitoring, where the two constituent parts either biodegrade into the soil at their end-of-life or can be collected and reused in future systems.

The sensor patch itself will be the biodegradable component. According to the team, the project will explore the use of materials such as rice husks and fibrous proteins like wool, as well as compostable polymers like cellulose and starch, embedded with conductive metal nanoparticles made from copper and zinc. Organic photovoltaics will be used to power the sensors, with energy stored in biodegradable supercapacitors rather than batteries, which have the potential to leach toxic elements into soil.

According to project coordinator Professor Ravinder Dahiya, from Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering, the sensors will be capable of tasks including monitoring pH, temperature and bioimpedance, giving farmers visibility over key metrics as crop yields across the globe come under increasing pressure from climate change.