Estimation of Soil Nutrients and Fertilizer Dosage Using Ion-Selective Electrodes for Efficient Soil Management

ABSTRACT

The recent advancements in precision agriculture have led to a high demand for a portable and intelligent device capable of accurately measuring soil nutrients with reduced use of chemicals. Instead of relying on chemical-based laboratory tests, a smart portable device has been developed. The device measures soil nutrients, such as ammonium, calcium, potassium, nitrate, and chloride, and provides fertilizer dose recommendations. The device uses ion-selective electrodes, a microcontroller, multiplexer, operational amplifier, data logger, and input/output units. It reports soil health status to farmers or users via WhatsApp and e-mail. The measured soil nutrient values are uploaded to a database, which generates soil health cards and fertilizer dose recommendations. The device’s performance was compared to standard methods, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9906 for ammonium, 0.9949 for calcium, 0.9852 for potassium, 0.9716 for nitrate, and 0.9716 for calcium. The sensor-based soil nutrient analyzer demonstrated similar performance to other established standard methods when tested on 250 soil samples of agricultural fields. Consequently, this device holds great potential for utilization in soil testing laboratories as well as for on-site soil monitoring in agricultural fields, specifically for the purpose of precision farming.

KEYWORDS:

• Fertilizer recommendation
• ion-selective electrode
• self-calibration
• soil health card generation
• wireless data transmission

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Director, CSIR-Central Institute of Mining and Fuel Research, Dhanbad, India, for granting permission to publish the paper. The authors are also thankful to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, for sponsoring this R&D work under the grant-in-aid project No. R-23011/3/2019-BTD. The authors express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewer for their diligent editing of the manuscript and for offering valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets obtained during the experimentation and modeling exercise shall be made available by the corresponding author upon a reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India [R-23011/3/2019-BTD].