Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are working to develop an automated system that will use a network of sensors in farmers’ fields to predict the likelihood of an outbreak of Cercospora leaf spot (CLS), a disease that has the potential to cause severe damage to sugarbeet crops.
Western Sugar Cooperative has agreed to help fund a University of Nebraska-Lincoln project at the Panhandle Research & Extension Center at Scottsbluff, Neb. The one-year project is led by plant pathologist Bob Harveson, water and irrigation management specialist Xin Qiao, and post-doctoral research associate Wei-Zhen Liang at the research center.
CLS has long been problematic to sugarbeet production throughout the eastern and Great Lakes production areas of the United States. In western Nebraska, it has been sporadic, but not a consistent issue. However, when it does occur, it can be very destructive.
Development of CLS depends strongly on very specific environmental conditions, including periods of high humidity or extended leaf wetness (more than 11 hours) and warm temperatures (higher than 60 degrees Fahrenheit at night and 80 to 90 degrees during day). Without these conditions, disease spread and damage to beet crops is greatly reduced or inhibited.
This made CLS an excellent candidate for a forecasting system, which was successfully created and implemented more than 20 years ago by UNL’s Eric Kerr and Albert Weiss. The system itself still works and is used, but it is also labor-intensive and time-consuming, because it requires workers to retrieve the information manually from fields each week.
Leveraging the rapid development of inexpensive sensors and wireless communications, it is now possible to apply Internet of Things (IoT) technology to switch the current CLS forecasting system from manual to automatic.
The Irrigation and Digital Ag Lab at the Panhandle Research & Extension Center has been prototyping an IoT platform that is able to transmit and process real-time sensor data. Currently, the platform includes two IoT communication gateways, and an in-house programmed website (www.phrec-irrigation.com).
Each of the two gateways can receive data from thousands of sensors (ideally within a range of five to 10 miles) in real time. Therefore, telemetry provided by IoT costs significantly less than telemetry by either cellular or satellite.
The project that has been funded by the Western Sugar Cooperative will use this platform to monitor air temperature, relative humidity and leaf wetness in growers’ fields, process the data, and perform calculations in real time to produce daily values indicating the likelihood of Cercospora infection using methodology developed by Kerr and Weiss.
The outcome of this project will provide an automatic mechanism utilizing the same CLS forecasting system currently in place for sugarbeet growers in Scotts Bluff County, Neb.
Besides immediate benefits to the g rowers, the project will also assist the Gering High School STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) program. It will develop hardware and software for a program led by GHS teacher Justin Reinmuth.