“They were amused with the concept of a hobby drone flying around the fields. But when we showed them the data, they got interested quickly.”
When most people think about sensors, they think about self-driving cars or smart homes. But some of the most interesting use cases that I’ve encountered involve putting technology to use underground, in measuring crop yields and monitoring the health of plants.
For the San Diego Business Journal, I featured three startups putting sensor technology to use in the agricultural sector: GroGuru, a company that builds underground sensors to measure soil moisture and salinity, Slantrange, a company making drones that track chlorophyll concentration in plants from above, and Go Green Agriculture, a company building automated greenhouses for romaine lettuce.
Pictured above: A drone equipped with sensors flies over a strawberry field in California. Slantrange, a startup based in San Diego, builds drones that measure the chlorophyll concentration in plants.