Decisions on crop management are frequently made ignoring important agro-climatic information or, in the best case, based on records by public stations. However, such information refers to very large areas, and agro-climatic conditions can vary in really short distances. Thus, the information available gives only a vague (sometimes even incorrect) idea to agronomists when they have to make a decision for a specific plantation.

The ability to determine whether a plant needs water, fertilizers or pesticides, when and how much, is key to sustainable agriculture. Irrigation accounts for approximately 70% of world water consumption and up to 58% of the applied pesticide treatments are unnecessary.

Nevertheless, the expected consistent growth in the GDI engine market must be continuously supported through innovative concepts aimed at further improving both performance and efficiency of the powertrain system.

Encore Lab developed Cesens (www.cesens.com), a DSS for agriculture. It is based on stations that gather data from the crops (weather, soil and plant conditions) and send them to a cloud platform to be converted into high-value information for the agronomists such as the risk of infection or the need of water using different prediction models.

Diagram of Cesens’ architecture.

At the moment, the following different approaches are available in the market:

1. To install several agro-climatic stations with GSM connectivity across the fields. This solution is expensive due the costs of the devices, installation and connectivity.
2. To install a mesh network of small nodes and a central agro-climatic station acting as gateway to the cloud. This solution has lower costs for devices and connectivity, but maintenance is expensive and reliability of the system is low.

CNODE’s goal is to overcome current technological limitations by building a new kind of sensor nodes based on the low energy consumption STM32-L0 platform and Sigfox communication technologies.

Encore Lab is developing simple low-cost sensing nodes with minimal maintenance requirements and a long battery life (at least five years) with little or no power supply. These simple and reliable nodes will incorporate only a few sensors to control the most changeable parameters: air temperature and humidity and soil moisture at three different depths. All these nodes will send data directly to the server using Sigfox communications. This way, the system will be less exposed to problems arising from node synchronization and node breakdown.

CNODE’s architecture