Summary

In order for the Commonwealth of Australia to meet its goal of “transforming the economics of soil carbon projects for Australian growers” and rapidly scale adoption of regenerative practices, the costs of baselining current levels of soil organic carbon (SOC) must be significantly reduced (currently prohibitive, averaging $5,000-20,000 per farm). The key focus of this project is to demonstrate the efficacy of hyperspectral remote sensing as a cost-effective and scalable technology to quantify SOC content, enabling widespread baselining of SOC on farmland. Based on an already-proven approach in the United States, this project will localize models to Australian soils and land management conditions within the scope of the broadacre agricultural production sector.

The project will be performed  over 2 phases:

Phase 1: Cloud Agronomics’ hyperspectral imaging apparatus will be flown by fixed wing aircraft over selected broadacre fields (from now on referred to as reference sites), and soil samples will be collected and analyzed over the respective fields. The sample analysis data will be utilized to localize Cloud Agronomics’ generalized SOC quantification models to the various properties of Australian soils. This step has to be performed only once.

Phase 2: Aerial and ground data will be collected once again over select . The aerial data will be utilized to produce SOC measurements without access to the respective sample analysis data collected in Phase 2. The remotely sensed measurements will then be compared with sample analysis results to determine the correlation between the two approaches.

Program

Transformative Industry Action

Research Organisation

Cloud Agronomics Pty Ltd