What is Soil Quality Indicators (SQIs)

As the world population increases, food demands continue with it. This puts the challenge to feed the world in a continuously rising priority position, which requires to be timely and properly addressed. Precision agriculture (PA), a concept that has been around for decades with the potential to address this challenge by maximizing agricultural efficiency and effectiveness, hasn't yet seen worldwide adoption due to missing enabling technologies. Soil sensing technologies able to monitor soil fertility/quality can close the loop in maintaining optimum soil conditions for maximizing crop yield and quality through the implementation of agricultural automated decision-making systems (ADMS). This chapter provides an overview of the existing soil sensing technologies towards the implementation of ADMS and highlights the major challenges in the development of such systems. The chapter continues to give an insight on how different technologies could be combined to form sophisticated systems for agricultural applications.