A holistic approach that acknowledges the vital functions of soil is fundamental to soil health. Beyond crop production, soil health encompasses the soil's ability to mobilize and buffer nutrients, store carbon, filter and retain water, and support biological activity. Measuring and predicting these ecosystem services through soil health indices is essential for future generations of farmers to ensure sustainable field management.
However, soil health indices are still largely based on primary soil properties. Advances in instrument manufacturing, computational power, and artificial intelligence have enabled rapid and accurate assessments of these properties. Among emerging analytical methods, diffuse reflectance spectroscopy has demonstrated reliability in predicting soil chemical parameters and providing indirect insights into soil physical properties in-situ.
AgroCares offers an integrated solution that combines a portable soil spectroscopy sensor, a comprehensive soil database, and advanced deep learning algorithms to predict soil properties under field conditions. This approach has successfully provided a reliable assessment of soil chemical status and a semi-quantitative evaluation of physical properties which might be used for an estimation of the soil health in-situ by the farmers or land managers. In collaboration with the scientific community, AgroCares is willing to take up the challenge of inferring soil health via spectroscopy. By integrating chemical, physical, and biological properties, this solution aims to drive progress toward real-time, in situ soil health assessment.