DNet4SSoils: A Distributed National Network for Evaluation of Sustainable Crop+Soil Solutions

Sustainable food production will need to minimise impacts on biodiversity and climate but reduced dependency on chemical supplements exposes farmers to enhanced volatility in terms of crop yield. To keep the balance between productivity and environmental concerns, farm enterprises need access to bespoke, locally tailored crop cultivation protocols – to both maintain yield margins at the marketplace and protect against climate stresses such as drought. This is especially true for small- and medium-sized farms with limited capacity for trial and error planting. Without access to resilient crop management protocols, the farming community will encounter significant delays in any national transition to a low-input farming strategy.

This project will apply autonomous robotics systems to develop a standardised, distributed crop cultivation testbed for the Organic and Low-Input farming Sector. Using robotic sensors to monitor crop performance and stress in specific growth settings, the project will facilitate the placement of small-scale experimental platforms at farms across the country, with the objective of identifying optimal crop variety and soil management practices in each farming region. This testbed network will provide standardised experimental arrays, with minimal labour burden on host farms, gathering 24/7 crop fitness readings from a wide diversity of crop varieties, local soil types, farm-specific soil management approaches, and local microclimates, generating a detailed, live, open-access database of crop cultivation alternatives for the farming community.