The continuously increasing demand for food for ever increasing population, becomes the biggest challenge worldwide due to climate change that affects land productivity, crop performance and yield. Given the increasing demands for water and food under global warming, one of the great challenges facing the agricultural sector is how to increase food production by using less water for irrigation. Another issue is the homogeneous application of not only water but N, P and K over the entire field area adopted by the majority of farmers. This results in over- and under-applications over different parts of a field, leading to poor yield and management of farming input resources, and negative environmental consequences, e.g., N and P leaching, or water scarcity. The solution would be to adopt variable rate fertigation (VRFI) at field scale, by applying the right rate on fertilisers and water for irrigation at the right time, and place using advanced sensing, modelling and control technology.
The aim of the project is to design and develop a fully-automated ICT-based data driven platform for VRFI. The integrated solution will be based on novel soil sensing technologies, a hose-reel fertigation system, ICT infrastructure, algorithms and decision support tools. The solution will attempt to account for all nutrients and water related limiting factors on crop yield by implementing advanced data fusion tools to derive VRFI recommendations. The integrated hardware and software infrastructure has not only practical application by farmers but can also be used for future research projects around precision agriculture, soil and water management, and environmental soil threats. The successful implementation of ADDFerti is foreseen to increase farmers’ income return, due to increased yield at reduced N, P, K and water consumption, and that more fresh water will be available for human daily consumption. ADDFerti is also expected to reduce the amount of agrochemicals applied into the soil and ground and surface water resources.
