In CAST for the Farm of the Future, researchers from various disciplines pooled their knowledge to develop CHIMES, a prototype microenvironmental sensor system for high-throughput data collection.
Collecting data for agricultural research is a tedious and laborious task. Researchers typically use multiple sensors to collect data from plants, soil, and air simultaneously. This results in a large amount of technology having to be brought into the field, each with its own data logging system, and finally, the complex task of post-processing and assembling the various data.
If you’re looking to build the farm of the future, the Cornell Agricultural Testbed and Demonstration Site (CAST) is the place to go. CAST’s interdisciplinary team of researchers is building an ecosystem of networked technologies and methods to meet the needs of the 21st century farm. This means everything from testing and integrating biosensors that monitor the health of individual dairy cows to developing processes to evaluate drone and satellite fertilizer applications on crops.
“CAST is a framework for developing and testing data-driven solutions to today’s most pressing on-farm challenges,” said Dr. Julio Giordano, professor of animal sciences and director of CAST. “In addition, CAST will facilitate the resolution of technical problems related to digital agricultural research.”
For Louis Longchamp, assistant professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences in the School of Integrative Plant Sciences and deputy director of CAST, the question of how to monitor crop microenvironments was an ongoing challenge. He knew he needed to combine sensors, but how to combine them? That’s where Longchamp’s graduate student, Dr. Alexander Yoa (Class of ’27), stepped in.
Yoreh has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and was up for the challenge of working with sensors. He proposed combining three types of sensors that were essential to his doctoral research on interseeding – the planting of cover crops between rows of field crops to provide extra nitrogen, prevent weed growth and promote soil health. Siddhant Ahlawat (’24), a master’s student in electrical engineering, quickly joined the sensor project, and the race was on to create a prototype for the 2024 growing season.
Yore explained that the three sensors provide different types of data in different formats. Two of the sensors are photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) sensors, which sense sunlight in the 400-700 nanometer range that plants can use. One PAR sensor senses the top of the canopy, and the other senses the bottom, providing a ratio of the amount of light that hits the plants above to the amount that reaches the ground. The third sensor measures a variety of parameters, including soil moisture, temperature, and overall electrical conductivity.
“We’re trying to collect high-throughput data, and we’re going to have data at many points in the field, so using all these sensors individually would be very time-consuming,” Yore says, “and at each point, we need to take a measurement from sensor 1, then sensor 2, then sensor 3. Finding ways to make this more efficient is really important.”
Yoreh and Ahlawat combined these sensors into a system they call the Crop Health Integrated Micro-Environment Sensor (CHIMES), which can be controlled with the push of a button. A microcontroller collects data from all the sensors at once, which is then sent to the cloud and can be downloaded as a spreadsheet.
While researchers will likely find CHIMES useful, Yore says it could also be useful to farmers: Knowing the amount of sunlight reaching between crop rows and soil parameters could help farmers with weed control, thinning decisions, and more.
“Institutions and infrastructure like the ones we have at CAST are places where disciplines come together to achieve common goals. Without that infrastructure, innovation like this might not happen,” Louis Longchamps said.
The researchers intend to keep CHIMES an open-source technology. “We’re creating a GitHub site,” Ahlawat says, “where we’ll put all of the links to the parts we used, how to connect them, the schematics, the code we wrote, and so anyone can start building and using these systems.”
CAST played a key role in developing the integrated sensor system, Longchamp explains. “Institutions and infrastructure like CAST are places where disciplines come together to achieve a common goal,” he says. “Without that infrastructure, innovations like this might not happen. An electrical engineer or an agroecologist might not have the opportunity to come up with a simple, integrated system like CHIMES. The engineer might not see the need, and the agroecologist might not know how to make it happen.”
Source: cals.cornell.edu
