Abstract
In general, farmers base their crop management decisions on a combination of their background knowledge, their experience with a field, and analysis of soil samples. Optimising agricultural production using precision agriculture requires detailed, high-resolution soil information. This level of detail is usually not available in current agricultural practice due to the cost of traditional soil sampling techniques. However, new sensor technology presents an opportunity to produce high-resolution soil maps, which can be used to support agricultural decision making and crop management. This chapter presents a highly sensitive sensor technology, based on the natural emission of gamma radiation from soil, which makes quantitative mapping of physical and chemical soil properties of the tillage layer possible. This method is shown to be capable of producing the high-resolution maps required for precision agriculture, and evidence is presented that in combination with precision agriculture techniques, it has already contributed to yield improvement.
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van Egmond, F., Loonstra, E., Limburg, J. (2010). Gamma Ray Sensor for Topsoil Mapping: The Mole. In: Viscarra Rossel, R., McBratney, A., Minasny, B. (eds) Proximal Soil Sensing. Progress in Soil Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8859-8_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8859-8_27
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