In partnership with the company Sencrop, trials on irrigation management in 4 regions of Western Europe and on potato and maize crops have been set up.

Their aim?

To assess the real impact of using connected weather sensors to manage inputs, optimize irrigation and reduce the need to travel for interventions.

What’s involved?

Different irrigation practices are being tested for each location and each crop:

• Crop management without irrigation,
• Crop management based on local farming practices (standard watering cycles)
• Irrigation using specific sensors (Irricrop).

The experimental sites were equipped with tensiometric and capacitive sensors. For example, a sensor dedicated to measuring solar radiation. Why is this measurement important in agriculture? Solar radiation, like water, is the basis of photosynthesis and therefore of the crop development process. Measuring irradiance is therefore one of the inputs needed to model available water resources and know when to irrigate.

The use of such sensors could enable us, as experimenters, to generate additional data and thus better qualify our experiments (soil type, changes in soil water status, etc.), particularly in terms of water stress.

Because farming techniques are changing, our experimental tools must also evolve. Staphyt’s Innovations unit works in partnership with start-ups to help design control tools. The success of your trials depends on the accuracy of our protocols and the quality of our measurements, and our technical teams work on this every day!

For more information, please contact us at contact@staphyt.com