As one of the GROW sites in the Sensing Mission of the GROW Observatory project, Quinta do Vale da Lama maintains this repository for sharing of all relevant data.
Our interest in this project is driven by 4 different but compatible purposes, i.e. :
- Gather baseline data for the farm, shared via GROW observatory : "ground-truthing"of satellite data
- Prove effectiveness of certain structural interventions already made: e.g. water-harvesting roads and swales: to evaluate impact on soil temperature and humidity retention
- Evaluate management strategies, to inform periodic adjustments : e.g. Pastoral method of Holistic Planned Grazing (vs continuous free-grazing or fallowing) as a strategy to improve topsoil coverage and depth -should have impact on soil temperature (reduced) and humidity (increased).
- Gather timely data, to inform ""Precision Agriculture" decisions : This being the original Design Goal of the product, as stated by manufacturer Parrot, it should be possible to manage JIT (Just In Time) agricultural interventions -i.e. applications of water and fertilizer in just the right amounts as & when needed- to maximize agricultural productivity, at least on a small scale.
Before proceding to full-scale deployment (see Project Road-Map below), the first step is to integrate essential technologies (essentially: the FlowerPower soil sensors, FlowerPower app for collecting and viewing data from individual sensors, GROW script & backend database, for uploading and downloading data from all sensors, hub.growobservatory.org website for collaboration with colleagues across Europe), to understand capabilities and limitations of the technology, to allocate resources as appropriate and integrate technology/ methods/ training into our workflow.
At this point, it is important to acknowledge that -much as we wish to contribute to this European-scale effort to understand Climate Change and co-evolve effective strategies for Adaptation and Mitigation (Purposes #1 and #2 above)- our investment of resources needed to support this effort will depend largely on the extent to which the farm can derive near-term benefits at the local level (Purposes #3 & #4 above) from the effort.
See the Lab Notebook #1 for data analysis from the 1st test sensor. (Alt: relative link)
with estimated completion dates
- Complete initial testing of sensor #1 (located in a controlled off-farm environment) and data flow, per Lab Notebook #1 July 20, 2018
- Expand sensor test to include the first group of sensors deployed on-farm (located convenient to Farm Office for easy monitoring) August 3 2018
- Based on learning derived from steps 1 and 2 above, develop a report to inform decisions and workflow associated with the next step August 15, 2018
- Full-scale deployment of the 320 sensors allocated to this project. Sept 15, 2018
- Share initial learnings with general public, and open collaboration October 15, 2018