Iftak Hussain, Shubham, Abhishek Dubey, Aabhas Kedia, Bodhisattwa Sanghapriya
INTRODUCTION
We are a team of students from different states with different educational background but we have tried to solve a common problem which may significantly help our farmers. We have developed a low cost, robust sensor which can detect nutrients level in soil. Early knowledge of soil nutrient level can significantly help the farmers to use proper fertilizers on time which promotes proper growth of their crops and save their money on unneeded fertilizers.
Most of the farmers are from rural and remote areas of India. These regions do not have any proper soil testing laboratory facility therefore, the use fertilizers on their farming fields with their experience and intuition. This would result in uneven presence of minerals in different areas therefore, different areas have different deficiencies. This leads to stunned growth of the plant. So, we planned to develop a low cost, robust sensor which can possibly help to detect the soil nutrient levels, which eventually help the farmers to add the specific nutrient required in his farm.
After that, we went to the farmers to know what the problems exactly are faced by the farmers. There we got to know that farmers mostly use nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers. So we targeted our first mineral to be phosphorus. Then, we searched for the existing technologies that existed for nutrient measurement in the soil. These are the two methods we found: