Musical theater enthusiasts rest assured the food-demanding plant from Little Shop of Horrors lives safely in the realm of fiction. But a recent technological development may make plant communication a reality, allowing crops to alert farmers when they need a drink and, more importantly, when they do not.

The new technology, brainchild of research associate Hans Seelig at the NASA-sponsored Bioserve Space Technologies center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a tiny sensor that clips onto the leaves of plants. The sensor picks up on the moisture content of leaves and wirelessly sends a message to a computer, which in turn signals an irrigation system to turn on or off. Farmers who use the sensor will know—with more precision than ever before—when their crops have had enough, potentially saving significant amounts of water, electricity, and money.

“If you watered every 40 hours instead of every 24 hours, you would get larger leaps between waterings. The savings could be as large as 30 to 40 percent,” Seelig said.

Today, agriculture consumes more than 80 percent of the water in the United States, with even higher usage in the American west. Farmers have traditionally watered for set blocks of time each day, relying on the looks of their crops or the feel of the soil as indicators of when to stop. But these methods lack the precision demanded by a warming, thirsting, industrialized world. Even soil-sensor rods lose accuracy because of shifting air pockets which create gaps between the soil and the sensor.

“If you look at climate change predictions, it is only getting dryer in the west. We can’t farm the way we’ve always done it over the next 10 to 20 years,” Seelig said.

Lucky for farmers, the sensor is moving quickly toward commercial availability. In March, it was optioned to the high-technology company AgriHouse, Inc., which is now addressing lingering questions about the sensor’s practicality. Seelig’s first trials took place in the comfort of a greenhouse, on the leaves of only three common crops. How the sensor will withstand weather and animal disruption has yet to be determined, and its versatility among a variety of plant species remains unknown.

“We’ll have to define the sensors for different crops, and then calibrate the sensors,” said Richard Stoner, founder and CEO of AgriHouse, Inc. But Stoner remains confident that this crop-customization is easily within reach.

“Every day it gets better and better,” Stoner said. “We’ve had interest from people in Israel; the Netherlands,” he added, emphasizing the sensor’s worldwide appeal.

Although details on cost and numbers of sensors per acre have yet to be determined, Seelig predicts pricing could be as low as $10 per sensor. Some farmers may upgrade to more sophisticated irrigation systems, which could split into sectors at the sensors’ signals, watering only those sections of a field that need it. This would cost more money, but the original technology in its simplest form is expected to remain relatively cheap.

Better yet, the sensor incurs no clean-up fee or environmental hazard. The semiconductor chip, smaller than a short grain of rice, is made out of silicon—free of polluting elements like lead and cadmium. It doesn’t require batteries, and can be powered by solar energy, the leaf’s own motion, or a base station charging wirelessly via radio-frequency identification technology.

This green design allows farmers to rest easy if a sensor somehow gets lost in a field of crops, or is accidentally swallowed by an animal as an unintentional part of a snack. “No one's going to put millions of feet of wire into a field,” Stoner said, agreeing with Seelig that wireless is possible and preferable. And above all else, the wire-free sensor is just plain futuristic-cool.

“Plants,” said Stoner, "through the wonders of electronics, are communicating with humans.”

Posted on Jul 5, 2007 at 6:45 PM
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