Crophesy Below Ground Technology Helps Tune Vegetable Crop Irrigation Practices
In the summer, changing weather and soil conditions can have a big impact on the quality and size of your vegetable crop yield: heat, drought, drying winds, and excess salinity can quickly stress crops to the point of harm. Traditionally, farmers have needed to visit the fields often, even multiple times during the day to check on their crops for early signs of stress, wilt, or disease. And they’ve relied on labs to provide insights into soil salinity, another threat to many drip-irrigated specialty vegetable crops.
How to Tune Specialty Crop Irrigation Practices
Today, intelligent sensors can continuously monitor soil conditions, not just at the top layer, but layer by layer, down to the active root zone to give continuous, real-time data about soil moisture, temperature, and salinity at each layer.
Crophesy by AquaSpy utilizes proprietary algorithms and underground sensors to monitor the crop’s active root zone and moisture uptake, allowing growers to use precise process control to give their specialty vegetable crops exactly what they need and when. Crophesy can show when the moisture is reaching the active root zone but not going below it, which will push costly nutrients past the root zone. This saves money and conserves nutrients.
Precise tuning is key since excess water can cause waterlogging. However, underwatering can impact yield as well. Crops such as onions rarely show signs of drought and need frequent water during dry conditions to prevent bolting. For other crops, such as lettuce, increased salinity causes steep decline in yield. Crophesy below ground wireless technology transmits soil moisture and crop status hourly so growers can immediately act, before crops are stressed, without having to step foot in the field.
Crophesy Process Control for Vegetable Crop Irrigation
With a Crophesy subscription, you receive a free, three- or six-sensor, wireless, soil moisture probe and access to the AgSpy software and AquaSpy app, making your data accessible on the go – on your mobile, tablet or desktop. Place the rugged, water-tight probes throughout your vegetable fields and connect them to the app via your smartphone. Then you can constantly monitor soil and crop health for all of your vegetables and receive alerts if your soil moisture or salinity falls outside of the crop-specific desired tolerances.
While you can look at the visual analysis of leaves, spending hours in your field, Crophesy enables you to open your app from anywhere and show you what kind of nourishment is available in your soil at your vegetable crop root depth. With this data, you can quickly determine when the active root zone needs vital moisture and nutrients.
Get the insights you need for optimized vegetable irrigation practices with Crophesy by AquaSpy.