A Smartphone App for Simple Soil Structure Analysis

Guaranteeing and improving crop yields is a major challenge to securing the worldwide food supply. Farmers need to be aware of the soil structure to produce crops under drought and improve the resilience of soils towards extreme weather events. Therefore, this paper introduces a high-fidelity smartphone app prototype for simple soil structure analysis. The primary motivation of such an app is to enable farmers to perform soil structure assessments without the need for expensive sensors and advise the farmers on which actions lead to an optimal soil structure. The app can further be used to build a database of soil structure images, enabling computer vision-based artificial intelligence to automate soil structure analysis in the future. Understanding the soil will help to reach the goal of zero hunger formulated by the UN's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, and can make agriculture more sustainable.