Wireless on the farm can help produce better crops, net more money for growers and land a superior product in stores for consumers, according to studies by Texas AgriLife Research scientists.

“We’re working on a system that uses wireless sensing in rice production,” said Dr. Lee Tarpley, AgriLife Research plant physiologist in Beaumont. “We’d like to be able to continuously monitor field conditions such as temperature and soil moisture, and using sensors allows us to do that. We can put them in the field and collect the data from them inside on our computer.”

Other researchers have devised a wireless system that can pinpoint the location on the farm where each module of cotton grew so a farmer can use the information to figure out why fiber quality differed on various acres. “We wanted to take that data and map it back to the field the cotton was grown in,” said Dr. Alex Thomasson, AgriLife Research agricultural engineer. “That enabled us to look at areas of a given field where cotton of different quality comes from. The ultimate goal was to produce profit maps that show how much money is being made or lost on each portion of a field.”

Read the whole article from Texas AgriLife Research here and watch the video below.