A periodic open-loop strategy to mitigate plant-soil negative feedback

Plant-soil negative feedback (PSNF) is the rise in soil of negative conditions for plant performance induced by the plants themselves, limiting the full potential yield and thus representing a loss for the agricultural industry. In this paper we present a control strategy to enhance the production of plant’s biomass by limiting the detrimental effects the PSNF has on its growth, and providing a simple yet effective “recipe” the human operators have to follow. To control the biomass growth we propose an open-loop, pulse-width modulate periodic control that allows the mean value of the biomass to be regulated by tuning some parameters of the input. Finally, we discuss a promising feedback control scheme that can also take into account economic costs.