The Role of Biodegradable Sensors in Precision Agriculture
The Need for Smarter Soil Monitoring
Modern agriculture faces a paradox: while technological advancements have significantly increased crop yields, conventional farming practices have also contributed to soil degradation, excessive fertilizer use, and declining biodiversity. The rise of precision agriculture aims to address these issues by leveraging real-time data to optimize decision making in farming.
One of the critical components of precision agriculture is soil health monitoring. Traditional methods such as soil sampling and laboratory analysis remain time-consuming and costly. These methods fail to provide farmers with real-time insights into the constantly evolving conditions of the soil, making it challenging to optimize irrigation, fertilization, water management, and the precise application of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Without timely data, decisions are often based on estimations rather than actual soil conditions, leading to inefficiencies, resource wastage, and negative environmental impacts.
This is where biodegradable sensors emerge as a transformative solution. By embedding sensors directly into the soil, farmers and researchers can gain continuous, real-time insights into critical soil parameters. This article explores how these innovative sensors enhance agricultural efficiency, promote sustainability, and support long-term soil conservation.
Understanding Biodegradable Sensors
Biodegradable sensors function by incorporating conductive materials within a degradable matrix. As certain environmental processes—such as microbial activity or moisture fluctuations—break down the matrix, the sensor undergoes measurable changes in its electrochemical properties. For instance, as the conductive network deteriorates, the sensor’s electrical resistance may increase. By quantifying this change in resistance, researchers can gain real-time insights into the environmental factors driving the degradation process.
Concept of a degradable sensor where the increase in resistance correlates with microbial activity in the soil.
How do they work?
Biodegradable sensors are fabricated by integrating three essential components. Depending on the application, each part requires optimisation in terms of degradability and functionality.
Key components of biodegradable sensors.
- Substrate: The foundation of the sensor, providing mechanical support and structural integrity while ensuring biodegradability. Typically made from biopolymers, cellulose-based materials, or naturally degradable films, the substrate must balance stability during operation with controlled degradation to minimize environmental impact.
- Functional component: The active sensing element responsible for detecting environmental changes. This component includes conductive biodegradable materials, such as carbon-based composites, metal nanoparticles, or polymeric conductors, which respond to changes in the environment by altering their electrical properties.
- Encapsulation: A protective layer that shields the sensor from premature degradation, ensuring it functions reliably for its intended lifespan. Typically composed of biodegradable waxes, silk fibroin, or hydrophobic coatings, encapsulation materials can be tailored to control the rate of decomposition, allowing for customized sensor longevity based on specific environmental conditions.
Biodegradable Sensor Fabrication
To ensure scalability and low-cost manufacturing, biodegradable sensors are often produced using additive manufacturing methods. These techniques allow for precise material deposition, minimal waste generation, and compatibility with biodegradable materials, making them ideal for sustainable sensor fabrication. The most used methods include:
- Screen Printing: A cost-effective technique for mass-producing sensors by depositing conductive inks onto biodegradable substrates. This method is widely used due to its scalability, rapid production speeds, and compatibility with various biopolymeric materials. Screen printing enables high-throughput fabrication of patterned electrodes while maintaining high reproducibility.
- Inkjet Printing: This method allows for the precise deposition of biomaterials and conductive inks, enabling the fabrication of high-resolution, customizable sensing arrays. Inkjet printing is advantageous for fine-feature patterning, making it ideal for sensors requiring detailed electrode designs and multi-layered structures. Additionally, it supports the integration of functional materials, such as biodegradable conductive polymers.
- Roll-to-Roll Processing: A highly scalable technique that facilitates the continuous production of flexible, biodegradable sensors. This method is ideal for large-scale applications where cost efficiency, rapid manufacturing, and consistent quality are priorities. Roll-to-roll processing allows for seamless integration of biodegradable materials into flexible sensor platforms, making it well-suited for environmental and agricultural monitoring applications.
By leveraging these additive manufacturing techniques, biodegradable sensors can be produced at scale, customized for specific environmental conditions, and integrated into existing precision agriculture systems with minimal ecological impact.
Applications of Biodegradable Sensors
Biodegradable sensors have a broad range of applications, enhancing agricultural efficiency and sustainability by providing real-time, field-deployable data. Below are key areas where these sensors could contribute to precision farming and soil management.
1. Soil Moisture Monitoring for Irrigation Optimization
Water scarcity is a critical issue in modern agriculture, as both over- and under-irrigation can negatively impact crop health and productivity. Biodegradable sensors help address this challenge by detecting moisture fluctuations in the soil, enabling farmers to fine-tune irrigation schedules and optimize water use. This technology prevents water wastage, ensures optimal plant hydration, and ultimately reduces costs while improving crop yields.
2. Nutrient Availability and Fertilizer Management
Excessive or unbalanced fertilization can be costly and lead to nutrient leaching, soil degradation, and environmental pollution. Biodegradable sensors provide real-time data on soil ion concentrations, particularly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) levels, allowing farmers to apply fertilizers more precisely. This targeted approach reduces excess fertilizer use, minimizes runoff contamination, and enhances overall soil fertility, leading to healthier crops and more sustainable farming practices.
3. Microbial Activity and Soil Health Monitoring
Soil microbial communities play a crucial role in organic matter decomposition, carbon cycling, and nutrient availability. Biodegradable sensors track microbial activity by monitoring changes in conductive matrix degradation, providing valuable insights into soil health over time. By assessing microbial respiration and enzymatic activity, farmers and researchers can evaluate soil fertility, optimize crop rotations, and implement regenerative agricultural practices that maintain long-term soil productivity.
4. Detection of Soil Contamination and Degradation
Soil contamination from heavy metals, pesticide residues, and excessive salinity can severely impact plant growth and long-term agricultural viability. Biodegradable sensors embedded with ion-selective materials detect contaminants and alert farmers to early signs of soil degradation before irreversible damage occurs. By providing real-time contamination data, these sensors support proactive soil management strategies, ensuring safer, more productive farmland while reducing environmental risks.
5. Smart Farming and IoT Integration
The integration of biodegradable sensors with IoT-based smart farming networks allows for remote monitoring and data-driven decision-making in agriculture. These sensors wirelessly transmit soil health data to cloud-based platforms, enabling automated irrigation, precision fertilization, and AI-driven analytics. This seamless connectivity enhances efficiency, reduces manual labour, and supports predictive modelling — paving the way for a more sustainable and technologically advanced agricultural system.
Workflow for the integration of biodegradable sensors, IoT networks, and AI for sustainable agriculture.
The Path Forward
As the pressure to farm more sustainably intensifies, agriculture is entering a pivotal decade. The sector is being reshaped by overlapping forces: breakthroughs in microbial fertilisers, the mainstreaming of regenerative practices, and the growing demand for traceability, accountability, and measurable environmental outcomes.
Biodegradable sensors — once confined to academic studies and proof-of-concept experiments — are now poised to play a central role in this shift. Their potential lies not only in reducing waste or minimising environmental impact, but in enabling a new generation of smart, short-term, in-field monitoring tools that align with the pace of modern farming.
They represent a different approach to sensing: one that’s temporary by design, but powerful in application. From monitoring the early-stage performance of biological inputs, to tracking soil response to regenerative practices across a growing season, biodegradable sensors offer insights that are timely, localised, and increasingly necessary.
Yet innovation alone isn’t enough. To move from the lab bench to broad adoption, these sensors must be integrated into systems that can handle the messy, variable reality of working farms. They must generate useful data — not just numbers — and feed into platforms that help growers, agronomists, and researchers make confident, timely decisions.
This is exactly the niche where BioSensor Solutions is positioning itself.
With its real-time soil monitoring platform already in early-stage deployment, the company is building the infrastructure that biodegradable sensors need in order to be effective at scale. It's not just creating technology — it’s creating the context in which that technology can thrive.
By aligning with the major trends transforming agriculture — from biological nitrogen to data-driven regenerative practices — BioSensor Solutions is ensuring it’s not chasing the future of farming. It’s ready for it.
Join Our 2025 Regenerative Digital Soil Health Pilot!
Are you a grower, farm advisor, or ag-tech provider exploring the future of regenerative agriculture?
BioSensor Solutions is launching our 2025 Digital Soil Health Pilot — and we’re seeking forward-thinking partners to join us.
Ideal Pilot Partners
- 🌿 Growers and farm advisors — trialling regenerative practices
- 🧪 Biofertilizer producers — validating microbial performance
- 🔗 Ag-tech integrators — embedding live soil data
- 🛒 Retailers — enabling regenerative sourcing
Let’s Collaborate!
We’re currently partnering with innovators across the agriculture value chain to test and refine our real-time soil sensing platform. If you're ready to explore what’s happening beneath the surface, we’d love to hear from you.
Contact us today to schedule a meeting and learn more about the pilot program.
Dr. Daniel Carroll is an electrochemist specialising in the development of biosensors for environmental, agricultural, and healthcare applications. He has worked in academic research, early-stage startups, and as a scientific consultant, helping translate early-stage innovations into practical technologies.
In addition to his research, Daniel advises companies on sensor development and scientific communication. He is the founder of Electrochemical Insights, a Substack that helps research students and early-career scientists build confidence in electrochemistry and apply it effectively in real-world research.
🔗 Connect on LinkedIn | 🌐 Electrochemical Insights
