Development of an automatic irrigation and fertili.. (OPTIFERT)
Development of an automatic irrigation and fertilization system
(OPTIFERT)
Start date: Dec 1, 2011,
End date: Nov 30, 2013
PROJECT
FINISHED
"Due to climate related changes, longer dry periods for European farmers and without irrigation the risk of a volatile harvests will rise, that is the reason for a tendency acrossEurope to irrigate fields. The need for innovative irrigated systems is to minimize water consumption and costs. Also in times of limited water the project will be lucrative.There are more and more increasing cost pressures like costs of water, energy and fertilizer, environmental legislation and requirements, cuts of subsidies, high personal costs etc. The project will help to save a huge amount of money by reducing the mentioned investments.The tendency to automatic systems in the agriculture is rising and in future farmers will do most of their regulating by a computer. The system will support the farmers to realize their work by modern technology.Furthermore the project minimizes the pollution of groundwater by reducing fertilizer to a limit and concerns of eutrophication will be decreased.The aim of the project is to develop a fully automatic irrigation and fertilisation system (with needs based fertilizer spreading) in order to help farmers to monitor and control their water and fertilizer consumption. That basically means we want to combine the irrigation and fertilization in one step. Furthermore, the system will diagnose the need ofthe plants with the help of sensors and the interpretation of terrestrial meteorological data. The system consists of a combined sensor-detector-dosage system, whichincludes a monitoring, control and distribution unit which enables the dosing and distribution of the water and the fertilizer."
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