Michigan State University researcher Bruno Basso suggests that advanced plant sensors can provide farmers with real-time data on soil, crops, and weather. However, their uptake remains slow due to high costs and complexity.
Furthermore, extreme weather events driven by climate change are decreasing yields. While sensors could and would help farmers adapt to the new climate, scaling networks out is shockingly difficult.
Additionally, more research and development is still needed to bring costs down, leaving most farmers to play the waiting game.
Moreover, emerging plant-worn sensors show promise for monitoring health. But questions remain about durability, connectivity, and implementation.
On the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything podcast, Reporter Jala Everett interviews Basso, as well as cotton farmer Kyle Bridgeforth and North Carolina State’s Qingshan Wei, to further understand the potential of plant sensors as they become evermore available on the market to combat the latest climate challenges.
To listen to the interview, visit WSJ Podcasts.
About the MSU Innovation Center:
The MSU Innovation Center is dedicated to fostering innovation, research commercialization, and entrepreneurial activities from the research and discovery happening across our campus every day. We act as the primary interface for researchers aiming to see their research applied to solving real-world problems and making the world a better place to live. We aim to empower faculty, researchers, and students within our community of scholars by providing them with the knowledge, skills, and opportunities to bring their discoveries to the forefront. Through strategic collaborations with the private sector, we aim to amplify the impact of faculty research and drive economic growth while positively impacting society. We foster mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with the private sector through corporate-sponsored research collaborations, technology licensing discussions, and support for faculty entrepreneurs to support the establishment of startup companies.
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