Electrical Conductivity and Soil Moisture

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

Moisture sensors can give helpful information to farmers, but it’s not a complete picture of water needs in a field or orchard. That’s why researchers at UC Riverside are trying to build models that would enable a soil water map. To do this, they combine data collected from soil moisture sensors with something called electrical conductivity. Professor of precision agriculture Elia Scudiero is leading this research.

Scudiero… “Electrical conductivity measures how a volume of soil can conduct electricity. So if the soil can conduct electricity, it means that it's got more water content in it, or more salts in the soil. And when you have like a strong gradient of a of soil type, you will have also like sand that has lower conductivity and clay content that has higher conductivity. The water content tends to go hand in hand with the texture of the field scale. So we were able to leverage also these type of relationships when we're doing our research. So that gives us an information of if the soil is conductive or if the soil is not as conductive. So this is kind of like a relative indication of the soil spatial variability, which has the need to be converted to a measurement that makes more sense for the growers, which is the volumetric water content.”

Scudiero hopes this system can replace limited sensor data and a lot of the guesswork in irrigation decisions.