Farmer Wants More Data From Beneath the Soil Surface

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Investors and startup founders have a variety of ideas of how agriculture can be improved, but what areas would farmers like to see more technologies? Saskatchewan-based farmer Kristjan Hebert says he’d like better ways to tell him what’s going on beneath the soil surface.

Hebert… “We've done a pretty good job in the last two decades of understanding what's going on above the ground. And we've done a pretty poor job of understanding what's going on below the ground. And I mean, especially in that four feet that we know full well, that the roots of all our crops are pulling moisture and using the nutrients in that four feet. One of the farms we toured when I was in Belgium last, they had the potato sensor and I actually had a good chat with the Blackwell potato crew, the Halverson family. They've been using them for 15 or 20 years, greg said. And I mean, it's a sensor, the same size as a potato that they put in the hill by the potatoes. And it's mainly from when it gets harvested to it gets in the shed. How many times it gets bumped cause obviously bruisings their big issue. But really it's that type of a theory tied somehow to our root system: how water is infiltrating the soil, how the nutrients are getting taken up? How is bulk density and carbon Bernoff actually even being effected by a growing crop? And I, and I don't think we've done a good job of that on a soil sensory type idea.”

Hebert added that physical sensors are great, but he hopes that it can move to remote sensing as much as possible to be feasible at scale.