Y.A. Djawad, J. Kiely, O. Jumadi, R. Luxton
In the past half-century, the production of crops and livestock is strongly driven by the increased use of irrigation, agriculture machinery, fertilizer, and pesticide. A balanced amount of fertilizer is needed to increase food production and to meet food security requirements by allowing a stable amount of staple food production. However, the amount of fertilizer needs to be limited to prevent unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions such as N2O. However, the measurement of N2O gas in agricultural settings is challenging, generally frequiring complex systems. The development and evaluation of a new nitrous oxide (N2O) gas measurement system for agricultural fields is described. This system consists of an Infra- Red (IR) N2O gas sensors module placed within an acrylic chamber and located in a agricultural field. It is connected to an Internet of Things (IoT) module for recording gas level measurements in the cloud database, thus permitting monitoring of the measurements in realtime using a mobile phone. Firstly, measurements were taken using standard gas to evaluate the characteristic of the sensor module. Susequently, the measurement system was tested in two experimental fields for 4 days with 10 mg urea fertilizer applied in each case. The measurement results using standard gas showed that the IR sensor module produced adequate result compared with the measurement using Gas Chromatography (GC). In situ field measurement showed the changes over the 4 days for each. These results indicate that this developed system can be used to monitor N2O gas levels in agricultural fields. © 2022 Association of Agricultural Technology in Southeast Asia. All rights reserved.
Electronics Department, Universitas Negeri Makassar, Indonesia; Institute of Biosensing Technology, Bristol, United Kingdom; Biology Department, Universitas Negeri Makassar, Indonesia
