GreenSense for Potato Plantation - A case study for Climate Smart Agriculture

GreenSense for Potato Plantations  - Smart Soil sensing 

Introduction - Potato is considered to be king of food staples and there won't be a single day that it is not used in a kitchen. As per Wikipedia most of the potato production happen in EU and Asia continent but China is the largest producer with 99.1 million tones followed by EU and India. Below is a image showing geographical distribution of potatoes production. 

Source - Wikipedia 

In India the top most potato producing states are Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Gujrat and Madhya Pradesh. Below is a image depicting the production of pototes in different parts of India. 

Source - Potatopro

Sensing is required thought out the whole eco-system of potato starting from 

• growing of seeds, 
• storage of seeds in cold storage ( if not stored in proper conditions, it can destroy all the seeds ). 
• during the transport of seeds to plantation area,
• during the growth of potato in the field and 
• during the storage of potato in cold storage before processing.

In this blog, we will focus on the Yuktix GreenSense application during the growth stage of potato in the field.

Client - One of the Largest agriculture FMCG in India. 

Product- Yuktix GreenSense and ankiDB cloud. 

Problem - Soil moisture play a major role during the growth stage of potato plant. Different amount of soil moisture is required during different growth stages of growth. The client wanted to test the effectiveness of a new soil moisture absorbent molecule by running tests across vast tracts of lands in a remote location. The claim from molecule manufacturers was to increase the soil water holding capacity by up to 30 percent. However, there was no data available to test the claim under

different and varying conditions. It was a challenge to collect data manually from such a vast tract of land in a remote location.

Challenges 

1. Remote off-grid locations in Orissa
2. Limited Network
3. Harsh Environment 
4. No power. Solar power with battery back-up for 10-15 days was required.
5. Have to cover vast area of land, thus more sensing points required. 

Solution - Yuktix battery powered wireless soil moisture nodes with research grade soil VMC ( volumetric water content ) sensors were deployed in the field with Yuktix solar powered gateway. 

For potato the variable of interest are 

1. Air Temperature 
2. Air Humidity 
3. Rainfall 
4. Soil moisture and soil temperature 
5. Solar Radiation 

The nodes were deployed in fields that have absorbent molecules (treatment group) as well as the ones without (control group). The data from all the fields were collected and Volumetric water content was computed in real time. The result showing side by side comparison of both treatment and control groups was published and passed to the client team daily. The client could see the variation across groups in real time. The nodes kept working without any maintenance during the entire project life-cycle. 

Impact 

1. Real-time data capture thus removing the dependency on on-field staff and thus saving 45 man-work hours in a month.
2. Yuktix GreenSense remove chances of human error. 
3. Quick report publishing for a distributed R&D and production team leads to quick decision making.

If you are FMCG company who use potatoes for one of its FMCG product, if you are contract farmers and want to use resources efficiently i.e. irrigation, pesticide and insecticide spray, if you are a agronomist who work for a FMCG company and need hyper local  weather, soil information then feel free to reach out to us. You can drop us a email at support@yuktix.com or call us at +81-8884515300 or fill this form and we will reach out to you. 

Keep following our blog, next we will be publishing one more case study related to Potato. 

Happy Farming