Agricultural Sustainability by Monitoring with Affordable Re-usable TouchScreens (Project Agri-SMARTs)

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In cutting edge sustainable farming in the UK, large glasshouse farms have irrigation systems that deliver nutrients directly to the plant roots in soilless systems, a form of aquaculture fertigation. This approach to farming is crucial in the UK in the drive to improve sustainability, reduce local environmental impact, reduce greenhouse gases and contribute to UK food and nutrition security. The problem identified is that currently there is no affordable method for in-line measurements of the nutrients being fed to the plants. Affordable integrated sensors that track nutrients are also needed for rapid and accurate tuning at every stage of the growth cycle to drive cost reduction, fertiliser and nutrient use efficiency and optimise yield response and flavour. There is an exciting potential sensing solution in the form of touchscreen technologies. Touchscreen technology is ubiquitous in our everyday lives. The screen on a typical smartphone is covered in a grid of electrodes, and when a finger disrupts the local electric field of these electrodes, the phone interprets the signal. Instead of interpreting a signal from your finger, what if we could get a touchscreen to read nutrients/electrolytes, since these ions also interact with the electric fields? We have shown how a typical touchscreen could be used to identify common ionic contaminants in soil or drinking water by dropping liquid samples on the screen, the first time this has been achieved. The sensitivity of the touchscreen sensor is comparable to typical lab-based equipment, which would make it useful in cost-sensitive or low-resource settings. In this project, we will simplify the sensors further to ensure they are easy affordable to manufacture and easy to tune for different ions of interest. These will be integrated into the site of a partner farm to demonstrate how nutrient tracking can deliver incredible advantages through precision agriculture.