Development of a tractor operated soil compaction measurement device

The heavy agricultural equipments cause high compaction in the top layer of the soil in agriculture. As the present method of soil compaction measurement is not ergonomically good practice by hand-held penetrometers either by static or dynamic. In India, the compaction data are taken by hand operated penetrometers generally which has certain limitations and more chance of error as manually operated penetrometers with dial gauge or digital display type penetrometers. However, some of the developed countries are using automatic multi-probe type sensor for collecting data for soil penetration resistance. Due to the limitations in hand held penetrometers, a tractor operated sensor based soil compaction measurement device has been developed which will increases the volume of data for a particular area and reduce human factor of error and upgrade the quality of measurement used by Indian scientific community for agricultural soil compaction so that scientists can correlate the crop parameters to be grown and this data can be used in agricultural machine design with different crop parameters and hence, recommendations for a particular machinery for a particular area or crop can be generated. Soil compactness and soil moisture content maps will give a colour coded maps of an area/particular region so that specific crop or the area needs attention on priority basis.