A Cornish farmer is trialling different approaches to improve soil health while reducing erosion and flooding – and using robotics to help him measure his success.
Working in a group of farmers across Cornwall, St Tudy-based Malcolm Barrett has trialled methods of sowing maize that minimise ploughing.
This including using “strip till” machinery that disturbed the soil in strips, rather than ploughing the whole field.
Maize needs a fine seed bed to establish and is easily outcompeted in its early growth stage.
This means heavy ploughing takes place to help give the crop the best chance, but this can lead to degraded and compacted soils that risk polluting rivers via run-off.
This is a particular problem in the South West where there is a lot of maize grown to feed cattle, and the degraded soils typical to this crop can cause a problem when rain hits and washes soil onto roads and into rivers.
Since reducing the use of the plough on his farm via a variety of min till methods, the trial – supported by Innovative Farmers - has helped Malcolm see improvements in his soil with less flooding and more worms.
Now the University of Plymouth has partnered with the trial as part of its research in the potential for agri-tech innovations to support land and water management.
The university is developing sensors that estimate soil organic matter and moisture levels, using natural radioactivity signals that come from all soil minerals.
This can provide data to help farmers see how effective their practices have been across a field and help them to plan how to better manage soils and water and improve productivity.
The research aims to show how the sensors can give the farmer a full picture of a field instantly on-site using hundreds of datapoints, rather than sending away a few soil samples to a lab, waiting for results, and then hoping those samples are representative of the whole field.
Sensors can be carried around the field to collect data, but this has now developed into cutting edge technology where the sensors operate on a robotic platform.
The robots can be programmed to travel more slowly and accurately than walking, creating more consistent data and reducing work for the farmer or advisor.
Malcolm said: “We're learning more about what the soil can do for us, and what we can do for the soil.
"It's helping everyone by helping the environment and we're getting huge benefits on our farm too. If we can understand our soil and our crops more, we can farm smarter by targeting our approach.
"Having thousands of data points from the robotic sensors helps to build a whole picture – then we can see if there's certain areas that need attention and single out management practices that work.”
Professor Will Blake, of the University of Plymouth, said: “This trial has meant we can get our science out of the lab and test it in a real-world setting, feeding back into other research programmes we're working on.
"We're using robotics to deploy soil assessment solutions that the world could take on."
