THE USE OF ELECTRICAL CONDUCTIVITY SENSOR ON THE GO TO PREDICT CLAY CONTENT IN THE SOIL OF BELGIUM

This study aims to validate the exploitation of electro-conductivity data for the evaluation of clay contents. During this work, the conductivity was measured by electrical resistivity tomography using the Veris. The repeatability, the limits of use as well as the influence of the speed of the quad on the measurements were evaluated. Several factors likely to bias the conductivity measurement have been studied. In addition, the calibration to convert the electrical conductivity into clay or useful water portion amount is sometimes not applicable to the entire agricultural parcel in the case of strong heterogeneities. Since this is mainly due to a memory effect of the soil, resulting from previous parcels differing from the current ones, a historical approach was adopted in order to take this heterogeneity into account. These results are therefore more than encouraging for the characterisation of highly heterogeneous soils in precision agriculture.