Harnessing Technology to Help Farmers Assess Crop Health Earlier | Penn Today
As the fall harvest arrives, Cherie Kagan and Akhila Mallavarapu of the Penn-led Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture (IoT4Ag) center explain how 1-cent biodegradable sensors could tell farmers how their crops are doing long before the yield comes in.
Key Takeaways
- The Penn-led IoT4Ag center unites four universities to build sensing, communication, and response systems for agriculture.
- The center’s biodegradable soil and leaf sensors are designed to cost as little as a cent and work with equipment farmers already own.
- Researcher Akhila Mallavarapu is spinning the leaf-sensor technology into a startup, Vividence Labs.
Every meal has a story that begins long before it reaches the plate. No matter what it is, parts of it trace back to the soil—some constituent component was planted, grown, and harvested at a farm. Even the seemingly unnatural qualifies; neon cheese puffs began life as corn, and gummy worms owe their wiggle to a syrup pressed from the same.
Behind every bite is a farmer who spends a season making calculated bets about water, fertilizer, and pests, hoping for a bountiful harvest without ever having a complete picture of what’s happening on each plant or beneath the soil.
“There’s a lot of competition for land that you could farm,” says Cherie Kagan, the director of IoT4Ag—a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center led by Penn. “You have to make the most of what you have—not ruin the fields, not waste resources.”
Add mounting threats like aflatoxin, a fungal contaminant locking U.S. peanuts out of foreign markets, and the bacterial greening disease hollowing out Florida citrus, and farming’s oldest problems intensify—by the time a cornfield yellows, the damage is done, and the fall harvest is already underway.