Wireless system gives growers access to soil moisture data

The advance from North Carolina State University is claimed to improve on existing technologies that can be used to inform irrigation practices that improve crop yield and reduce water consumption.

“Estimating soil moisture is important because it can be used by growers to irrigate their fields more efficiently – only irrigating fields when and where the water is needed,” said Usman Mahmood Khan, first author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State. “This conserves water resources and supports things like smart agriculture technologies, such as automated irrigation systems. What’s more, conserving water resources can also help reduce carbon emissions, because less energy is used to pump water through the irrigation system.”

According to NC State, CoMEt does not require any in-ground sensors because it assesses soil moisture using ‘phase,’ which is a characteristic of radio waves that is affected by the wavelength of the radio waves and the distance between the radio wave’s transmitter and the wave’s receiver.