These tiny, lightweight gadgets could mean huge savings for farmers

"Farmers have a very good eye. They can look at their crop if they've been farming for a long time and say, 'My crop needs water, I can tell,'" says Richard Stoner, founder of the biotech and agriculture company, AgriHouse.

So who might know more abou ttiffany jewelry what a plant needs than a farmer or a greenhouse owner? How about the plant itself? What if plants could tell us when they are thirsty?

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), AgriHouse has developed a leaf sensor that is enabling plants to do just that.

The clear plastic sensor measures about an inch by a quarter of an inch; light enough to fit on almost any leaf.

Here's how it works: When a plant starts buy wow accounts drying out, its leaves contract. That change can be measured in electrical voltage. The sensor transmits those voltage changes to a cell phone, or computer, so a farmer can use the data to turn irrigation equipment on or off.

So before even the keenest eye of a farmer or a florist might notice a plant starting to wilt, the sensor can transmit a message to "send water."

Measuring the water buy wow accounts deficit stress in a plant did not begin as an idea for earthly plants. The technology was first developed by aerospace engineers and the doctoral research work of Hans-Dieter Seelig of the University of Colorado at Boulder's BioServe Space Technologies Center.

"The original inventors were looking at [the sensor] as a device to go to Mars, where the astronauts would have to spend over 70 percent to 80 percent of Louis Vuitton their waking hours farming," explains Stoner. "They'll need devices that would be in the greenhouses on Mars that would free up their time."

Stoner and his colleagues have developed other products to help plants grow in space. One, a nutrient called Organic buy cheap wow gold Disease Control (ODC), was flown and tested on the Mir space station. The experiments were conducted with adzuki beans.

"Where the ODC was placed in the solution, the plants grew taller than those that were controls with just water," says Jim Linden, professor emeritus of the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Colorado State University (CSU). "The product is wow gold being tested on all kinds of commodity crops, corn, soybeans, tomatoes, peppers, around the world. Farmers are very interested in it to increase their yield."

"NASA couldn't fly into space things that are harmful to humans, or harmful to the environment. So what we were able to do is create this liquid product to replace pesticides. AgriHouse has since cheap wow accounts received EPA approval on this as an eco-friendly bio pesticide," says Stoner.

Stoner has also worked with Linden and Ken Knutson, CSU professor emeritus of horticulture and landscape architecture, on aeroponics projects.  Wpj30