Real-Time Soil Analysis In The Field

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

One key agronomic insight that can completely change the outcome of a crop yield is doing a soil analysis. Canadian-based agtech startup ChrysaLabs wants to make it easier for farmers to measure things like carbon and nitrogen, by using soil sensors to get quick, real-time results.

Fournier... "We've developed a suite of optical design sensors, basically to look at soil quality with the biggest objective to improve land potential and decrease the carbon footprint of agriculture. So the suite of technology that we have are different sensors that all have different aspect and different value proposition that we're working on. Nutrient quantification in soils, we're working on carbon quantification in soil. We're working on kind of soil health and soil quality more broadly. And basically it's a sensor that captures information from the soil, so it's an NC2 type of sensing. We need to be in proximity with the soil, so in the soil, very close to it. And then we basically, what we capture at that point, our spectrum from the soil directly and we apply machine learning on a cloud computing engine that we've developed. So it's basically a large database that sits in the cloud and we shift those spectrum that we collect into nutrient concentration or soil properties and then we push back the information into a user app or to an API due to preferred platform of our partners so it's basically a way to digitize soil in a very effective way and in a very accurate way."

ChrysaLabs uses the traditional method of a soil probe, but founder Sam Fournier says they are exploring ways to automate.