Lucknow
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur has developed a mobile-app-based soil testing device to potentially help in curbing the practice of fertilizer overdose due to a lack of information.
The rapid soil testing device, which can detect soil health in 90 seconds, will assist farmers in obtaining soil health reports along with recommended doses of fertilizers.
The portable and wireless soil tester requires only 5 grams of dry soil for detecting macronutrients. Once the soil is poured into the 5cm-long cylindrical device, it connects with the mobile phone through Bluetooth. The results appear on the screen in the form of a soil health report, which is accessible on Bhu Parikshak cloud service.
The device can detect six important soil parameters, including nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, organic carbon, clay contents, and Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC).
The technology has now been transferred to an agritech company, AgroNxt Services, with the signing of an agreement for commercial production.
The first-of-its-kind farm-centric innovation is based on Near Infrared Spectroscopy technology to provide real-time soil analysis reports on smartphones with an embedded mobile app.
The app comprises a user-friendly interface available in local languages for easy use by farmers. The device can test up to 100,000 soil test samples.
“Farmers face a lot of hardships in getting the soil tested. I am delighted at our team for developing a device to assist individual farmers in assessing the health of the soil in no time. This is another step towards achieving the goal of technology self-reliance,” IIT Kanpur director Prof Abhay Karandikar said on December 13.
The product development team comprised Jayant Kumar Singh from the Department of Chemical Engineering, Pallav Prince, Ashar Ahmad, Yashasvi Khemani and Aamir Khan.