Potential applications of quantum sensors in agriculture: A review

In precision agriculture, farmers adopt sensors to improve decision-making, monitor the conditions of the soil, optimize fertilizer and herbicide application, and enhance overall yields from farms. Traditional sensors are based on IoT components that relay signals from soil and the farm to servers where data management operations improve decision-making. However, cyber threats, high costs of maintenance, and poor connectivity to the internet challenges hinder the adoption of the sensors. To address such shortcomings, quantum sensors, based on quantum mechanics principles, are adopted in agriculture based on their higher sensitivity and chemical inertness. The focus of this review article was to investigate the different perspectives on how quantum sensors are used in agriculture. The review article assessed the potential applications of quantum sensors in agriculture, where 119 studies sourced from different scientific databases were examined. The insights showed that quantum sensors were applied in agriculture to enhance seedling growth and emergence due to the chemical inertness and solubility. Additionally, the sensors enhanced crop growth through the provision of nutrients and antioxidants to promote the growth of crops. The findings further indicated that sensors were used to detect harmful pollutants and chemicals from water sources and agricultural foods such as pumpkin seeds. Other applications included monitoring the soil fertility levels. The analysis also showed that the sensors were used as measuring instruments to evaluate photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) in evaluating plant photosynthesis. The recommendations from the review article advocate for the continued adoption of quantum sensors as they outperform the classical sensors due to their atomic-level sensitivity. However, in the future, scholars ought to focus on investigating methods that are cheaper to integrate quantum sensors in large-scale farming operations.