Modular wireless sentinel of water percolation, water potential, soil texture, salts, pH, and nutrients in depth, to reduce water use and energy and optimise fertilization in crops

ongoing

The climate change manifests in longer periods of drought on one hand and extreme overflow of watercourses on the other hand. This will significantly disrupt the agriculture sector, which strongly relies on certain temperatures and precipitation levels. The farming choices and the climate will determine the water footprint of agriculture: over-exploitation of water resources is a threat to farming and the environment. This is the origin of the LIFE HYDROSTICK project, which aims at making precision farming easy and accessible by means of demonstrating in real scale a new modular, flexible, autonomous, user-friendly (plug&connect) and customizable IoT solution allowing real-time monitoring of soil data (i.e. water content, water potential, temperature, conductivity (quality and type of mineral salts), nutrients (N,P,K), pH), to increase sustainability and productivity in the agro-industry sector. The LIFE HYDROSTICK technology will be demonstrated in real scale, to showcase its performance and its ability to achieve substantial water savings and efficiency in the use of fertilizers and fertigation practices. It will be first validated in greenhouse, followed by a full scale demonstration in 4 pilot crops of 2 Spanish locations (Navarra, Extremadura). The leading entity is FERNANDO SARRIA AGROTECHNOLOGIES (FSA) inventor and developer of the Hydrostick technology, and in this project it will be accompanied by AN S.Coop. (AN), which will lead the validation process and the Instituto de Agrobiotecnología (IDAB-CSIC) which will be in charge of designing and executing a validation plan for the validation of the HYDROSTICK in different fields. The methodology consists of 6 WP related not only the real scale testing, but also the technology scaling-up, dissemination and communication of results, design for replication and transferability and exploitation of project results. 5 environmental KPIs have been defined to monitor the impacts that the project aims to achieve.