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a hand holds onto a piece of tech in a corn field

Crops & Soils Tech at CAST

Crops and soils are integral to the farm of the future. CAST is developing, testing and integrating a variety of technology that centers on planting, monitoring and harvesting crops, and monitoring and analyzing soils.

CHIMES

a man positions a piece of tech in a corn field
Siddhant Ahlawat ’24 checks the CHIMES sensor in a corn field. Photo by Jackie Swift.

Combining three sensors in one to simplify field data collection.

Data collection for agricultural field research can be cumbersome and tedious. Multiple sensors gather data from plants, soil and air—all at the same time. Each piece of technology has its own data logging system, which means complicated post-processing assembly of the disparate data.

The Crop Health Integrated Micro-Environment Sensor (CHIMES) is a three-in-one sensor that requires one push of a button. A micro-controller gathers data from all the sensors at once. The data is then sent to the cloud and can be downloaded as a spreadsheet. 

Developed by graduate students under the oversight of CAST Associate Director Louis Longchamps, CHIMES is already being used in the field as part of CAST research.

Rowbot

Play Rowbot test run

Rowbot is an autonomous robotic multi-use platform being developed by Rowbot Systems. The small, nimble machine can take on a range of tasks on large-scale, row crop fields, including cover crop interseeding and fertilizer application. It is small enough to fit in between the rows of mature corn that most tractors would damage.  

Rowbot recently had a test run at our CAST farm.