Precision Agriculture: Challenges in Sensors and Electronics for Real-time Soil and Plant Monitoring

This paper provides an overview of the barriers for the implementation of precision agriculture and the basic structure of a possible automated decision-making system. It further provides a review on the most common sensing principles that can be used for in-situ and real-time soil quality monitoring, as well as an overview of the difficulties for deploying these sensing systems and their electronic interfaces in the harsh soil environment. It reviews existing agricultural circuits and sensing systems designed for agricultural monitoring and their limitations whilst highlighting remaining challenges in order to make automated, decision-making systems for precision agriculture, a reality.