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MDes 2023
Climate Adaptation and Mitigation for Smallholder Farmer Communities through ‘Soil Designing’
Introduction
‘Unearthing the Future’ is a project that tries to tackle climate adaptation and mitigation for small-scale farming communities by improving soil health and bringing together the community. The project tries to situate the farmer and farming circle at the center of the solution by taking a hybrid approach of using their indigenous knowledge and utilizing technology whenever needed to tackle climate change. This is done by designing a modular community-based IoT sensor network through which farmers can track their soil health and get suggestions for improvement. The platform also enables the sharing of data, knowledge, and success stories in local farming communities through an accompanying mobile application to build community climate resilience in the long term.
Final Design
As part of the project, I delve into the concept of ‘Soil Designing’ as a regenerative and climate-resilient agricultural practice for smallholder farmers. The [soil health] goals could be influenced by a variety of factors like farmers’ micro-climate, farming methods, economics, indigenous knowledge, and climate threats.
The final design consists of a system of hardware and software components that connect the major stakeholders- smallholder farmers, local farming communities, scientific advisory boards, and government organizations. The sensing hardware is provided to farmers through tool-lending libraries in local counties across California.
The hardware system consists of modular hardware sensors with each unit helping in surveying a particular parameter of the soil. The major parameters monitored are pH, temperature, moisture, soil organic matter, nitrogen, organic carbon, phosphorous, potassium, and calcium.
This is complemented by a companion mobile application for farmers, SoilEx. Smartphones have widespread penetration in the farming communities, thus, becoming an apt tool for being an interface for connecting local farmers as well as keeping track of soil health. In SoilEx, farmers can join local farming groups to share success stories and get advice on their daily problems. Through the app, government bodies can connect with farmers and help increase technology adoption by sharing stories of successful technology implementation, the latest knowledge, and resources.
Going into the future as the global food demand increases, soil health will play an even more foundational role in our food systems. With the rise in machine learning (ML) capabilities, future iterations could have more personalized analysis and suggestions with the help of ML. As more data is collected and new scientific research frontiers are explored, the ML models could be fine-tuned for regional communities or even for each farmer based on their goals and constraints. Applications in urban farming could also be explored as they become more ubiquitous and integrated in urban lifestyles.
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