Soil Water Map - Part One
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Water management is one of the biggest challenges facing agriculture in California and other dry regions. Currently, growers rely on soil moisture sensors to determine when to irrigate. A new UC Riverside system can map soil moisture tree by tree, so growers water only where and when it’s needed. Professor of precision agriculture of Elia Scudiero says this is something growers have been requesting for some time.
Scudiero… “ A lot of these growers already have some soil moisture sensors. But again, these are tremendous information, right? But they provide not the information that those growers needed because you, you measure soil moisture at a single point, and that tells you very little about an entire orchard. And even if you are so good that you are planting it in the average point of your field, you are overing half of it and under the other half. So if you have these distributed sensors, so just a few sensors in a field, and you're able to mobilize another sensor that can learn from those sensors and then translate this information across the entire field. That becomes an opportunity to map soil moisture at every single field. And that's what we started doing exactly five or so years ago.”
The research is ongoing, but Scudiero would like to see crop consultants and service providers using it to assist growers in the future.
