Sensors for agriculture

Agricultural engineering is facing ever greater challenges, also in Germany, due to growing demands for the protection of the environment and for sustainability, while land and fossil resources are limited. Optimized processes are indispensable to master these challenges successfully. This is why industrialization has also had a strong impact on agricultural engineering in recent decades. Digitalization, automation and electrification of agricultural processes offer numerous starting points for resolving the conflict between sustainability and productivity. By understanding the interrelationships in the biosphere, productivity can be significantly increased through optimized processes based on comprehensive data. At the same time, sustainability shall be achieved by highly automated part-crop or plant-specific field cultivation with electrified attachment technology.

Fraunhofer IPM promotes the development of new and improved sensors especially for agricultural use. The current focus is on nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural land. For this purpose, a laser absorption spectrometer with special evaluation software and adapted gas sampling is being developed.