The project objective is to greatly reduce the cost of monitoring soil water content in highly resolved vertical profile to promote increased adoption of more efficient water management tools

This National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program Project Grant award, with a total funding of $649,991, was made to Transcend Engineering And Technology, LLC (doing business as Transcend Engineering) to greatly reduce the cost of monitoring soil water content in highly resolved vertical profiles. The goal is to promote increased adoption of more efficient water management tools in permanent agriculture. The new multi-level soil moisture sensor system being developed will replace and improve upon significantly more expensive technologies currently on the market. Applying a proprietary machine intelligence, the sensor system and associated data processing techniques will accurately determine root uptake and deep drainage, forming the basis for a sophisticated irrigation decision support system. This research aims to enable improved water and energy conservation, resource protection, and adaptability to climate change through advanced, cost-effective soil moisture monitoring capabilities.

Cost is the most significant barrier to adoption of sophisticated data-driven irrigation management in permanent agriculture. Highly resolved vertical soil water profiles are needed to learn soil-specific hydraulic response and to accurately infer crop water uptake and deep drainage fluxes from monitored changes in the storage profile. Basing irrigation decisions on the time-varying soil hydraulic behavior learnedin situwill enable the improvement of water and energy conservation, resource protection, and adaptability to climate change. The massive proliferation of wireless accessories has driven the cost of integrated circuit (IC) based programmable RF transceivers unprecedentedly low and usability unprecedentedly high. We propose to repurpose low-cost RF chips as soil water sensing devices arranged in a dense linear profile for high-resolution vertical water content profiling. Electromagnetic waves transmitted through a material are affected by the dielectric permittivity of the material. Preliminary work has demonstrated a relationship between signal strength and permittivity of the surrounding material which is a strong indicator of soil water content. The new multi-level sensor will replace and improve on significantly more expensive multi-level soil moisture technologies currently on the market. Applying a machine intelligence (MI) we have developed, this and other multi-level sensors can accurately determine root uptake and deep drainage which form the basis for a sophisticated irrigation decision support system offered by our precision AG commercialization partner.