An increasing challenge for agriculture in times of climate change is to sustainably ensure or increase the yield capacity of crop production. Low-yielding sites are particularly at risk in this respect. One strategy to counteract is to promote the use of the subsoil. This article describes the technical procedure and development of an implement for stripe-wise subsoil melioration with application of compost in a layer of 30–60 cm. These stripes are each 30 cm wide and 70 cm apart. A technology has been developed for process, which allows the described procedure to be used over a large area. The melioration is carried out in one pass by an implement in an arrangement of 3 rows resulting in a working width of 3 m. A hopper on top of the implements frame includes an embedded hydraulic system to feed compost into the injection coulter. Results from 4-year field trials with standard crop rotations verify yield increases of up to 20% still 5 years after melioration. An overview of these trials and results will also be presented.

In agriculture, efforts are being made to reduce pesticides and fertilizers because of the possible negative environmental impacts, high costs, political requirements, and declining social acceptance. With precision farming, significant savings can be achieved by the site-specific application of fertilizers. In contrast to currently available single sensors and camera-based systems, arrays or line sensors provide a suitable spatial resolution without requiring complex signal processing and promise significant potential regarding price and precision. Such systems comprise a cost-effective and compact unit that can be extended to any working width by cascading into arrays. In this study, experiments were performed to evaluate the applicability of a TrueColor sensor array in monitoring the nitrogen supply of winter barley during its growth. This sensor is based on recording the reflectance values in various channels of the CIELab color space: luminosity, green–red, and blue–yellow. The unique selling point of this sensor is the detection of luminosity because only the CIELab color space provides this opportunity. Strong correlations were found between the different reflection channels and the nitrogen level (R² = 0.959), plant coverage (R² = 0.907), and fresh mass yield (R² = 0.866). The fast signal processing allows this sensor to meet stringent demands for the operating speed, spatial resolution, and price structure.