AgroPad: A real-time on location and chemical analysis of the soil or water using AI
The IBM Research, Brazil announced the AgroPad loT prototype that is AI-powered technology that will help farmers’ health check soil and water.
This technology comes at a time when farmers have to send their soil and water samples to a lab for environmental and other chemical analysis. This is often expensive and time-consuming and in most cases out of reach for smallholder farmers.
The advantage of empowering farmers with soil and water analysis is that they can perform environmental analysis on their farm and with the results they obtain make decisions that can help increase their crop yield.
Watch the video of AgroPad
How does it work
The engineering.com aptly explains how this technology works, ‘The farmer puts a drop of soil or water on the test strip. The five indicators change color based on the levels of pH, nitrogen dioxide, aluminum, magnesium and chlorine that are present in the sample.
The farmer’s smartphone then performs machine vision on the strip, runs the results through a machine learning algorithm and spits out a chemical read.
The app makes a recommendation to the farmer for fertilizer adjustments that will help optimize the crop’s growth. For the final touch, the data gets uploaded into the cloud along with all the other chemical reads from the area. Interested parties can track greater trends of soil and water in the geographical area’ .
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