Soil sensorExamples of adoption: Creating a suitable green pepper cultivation plan through soil data visualization and achieving stable harvests

Soil data like EC (electrical conductivity), water content, and temperature collected by soil sensors are fed into RightARM, a data analysis service provided by Terrace Mile, Inc., which the Kurouno Agricultural Research Society then uses to achieve stable harvests of its agricultural products.

The Kurouno Agricultural Research Society experienced issues in understanding soil conditions underneath seedlings in order to achieve stable cultivation of its agricultural products. Increasing productivity during the winter season (increasing shipment volumes) and stabilizing shipments during the shipping season (November until June of the following year) would significantly impact revenue.

Adequately understanding and controlling conditions both above and below seedlings is a requirement to achieving stable harvests. The society could not adequately visualize conditions within the soil, however, so it could only use the condition of field surfaces to determine causes that negatively impact seedlings.

Farmers need soil sensors to adequately understand soil conditions underneath seedlings so that they can take suitable preventative countermeasures at earlier stages. However, they have had various issues with the accuracy and control conditions of soil sensors used to date. For example, Japanese products are reliable, but require a lot of preparation before use.

Terrace Mile, which offers agricultural data analysis, sensed a problem that could be solved and sought to create a groundbreaking new product.

Murata sensors are highly accurate and the data collection logic was easy to understand, so farmers could collect remarkably reliable data, which was a major point for their adoption.

Murata's soil sensors measure the EC (electrical conductivity), water content, and temperature in soil and compare that information to fluctuations in soil moisture caused by irrigation levels and meteorological conditions based on empirical values. The values this obtains are based on logic instead of historical experience, which was determined to be sufficient for investment.

Sensors could also be installed simply by burying them in the ground, so the decision was made to adopt them based on their ease of use in any environment and cost performance.

The following graph compares how fertilizer is applied after seedlings are planted for methods without "too much thought" used to date (image 2-A on the right) and methods using the most up-to-date knowledge (image 2-B on the right).
The method in image 2-A drastically increases EC (electrical conductivity) before seedlings take root (roots settle and stabilize).
However, we learned that seedlings' roots will burn if they come into contact with concentrated fertilizer while they are still young. Restoring them requires additional time and energy, which negatively impacts the quality of agricultural products and leads to unstable yields.
Image 2-B on the right shows a method that does not drastically raise EC (electrical conductivity) before seedlings take root. This was shown to improve the condition of agricultural products, so that method was used for all fields and yields stabilized.

We feel that being able to collect highly reliable data while providing cloud services to analyze business results, analyze causes, make predictions, etc. leads to offering higher-quality business analysis services.
We will use this assessment to continue promoting the early adoption of Murata sensors to manufacturers of farming environmental control equipment and environmental monitoring services.

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