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Advancement in Soil Testing with New Age Sensors: Indian Perspective

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Soil Analysis: Recent Trends and Applications

Abstract

Soil is one of the crucial resources for maintaining a sustainable future of Indian agriculture for food security. It is a heterogeneous dynamic body influenced by natural and anthropogenic agents; hence, its spatial and temporal variability is inevitable. The soil health card scheme introduced by the Govt. of India aims to issue soil card to farmers which will carry crop-wise recommendations of nutrients and fertilizers for the individual farms for improved productivity through judicious use of inputs based on the soil health card for the area. All soil samples are to be tested under this scheme which includes about 121 million agricultural fields across India. The capacity of the soil testing laboratories far lags behind the requirement that is coming under the soil health card scheme. The Government aims to use this card to 14 crore farmers across India. In general, precise mapping of soil using conventional analysis is laborious and time consuming. Combining this challenge with the ambitious soil health card scheme makes it quite a challenging task to accomplish. Advanced sensing techniques such as portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (PXRF) and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) can be used to help this challenge by developing soil spectral libraries. Soil spectral library contains spectral signatures of specific soil types that can be linked to a range of spectral properties. With the development of empirical models for different nutrients of benchmark soils, spectral libraries can help rapid analysis of thousands of samples in a short time. This chapter will give a basic overview of PXRF, DRS, and other commercially available soil sensors with their advantages and disadvantages.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agricultural and Food Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

    R. K. Swetha, Swagata Mukhopadhyay & Somsubhra Chakraborty

Authors
  1. R. K. Swetha
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  2. Swagata Mukhopadhyay
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  3. Somsubhra Chakraborty
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Somsubhra Chakraborty .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Soil Science & Agri. Chemistry, Institute of Agricultural Science, BHU, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Amitava Rakshit

  2. National Parks Board, Centre for Urban Greenery and Ecology, Singapore, Singapur, Singapore

    Subhadip Ghosh

  3. Agricultural & Food Engineering Dept., Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

    Somsubhra Chakraborty

  4. Soil Management Lab, Plant Science and Health, Horticulture and Community Gardening Division, National Parks Board, Singapore, Singapore

    Varughese Philip

  5. Asian Institute of Technology, Dept of Food, Agriculture & Bioresources, Klong Luang, Pathum Thani, Thailand

    Avishek Datta

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Swetha, R.K., Mukhopadhyay, S., Chakraborty, S. (2020). Advancement in Soil Testing with New Age Sensors: Indian Perspective. In: Rakshit, A., Ghosh, S., Chakraborty, S., Philip, V., Datta, A. (eds) Soil Analysis: Recent Trends and Applications. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2039-6_4

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