In the field of agriculture, the cost of leveling, and the availability of land conducive to leveling, are enormously expensive and increasingly rare. Farmers are being forced to increase the quality and volume of crops produced on this limited land area as well as to find innovative ways to economically open up new tracts of land and make them produce the desired crops.
These new tracts of land add new challenges as they are not cost-effective to level and require new techniques for optimizing their productivity. Farmers are now using land-forming technologies customized for agriculture to optimize their field topography to meet the requirements of proper drainage and even irrigation coverage without compromising the thickness of topsoil across the field. Removing too much topsoil decreases the ultimate fertility of the soil and results in very poor crop performance in a lot of the affected areas. Further, drainage and irrigations systems, if not optimized, may become costly.
Although topographical surveys and/or soil profiles (in some cases, 3-D topographical surveys and/or 3-D soil profiles) are performed on land, such as farm land, such techniques have not been integrated in a consolidated system that takes such data into account to design a drainage system for the agricultural area and to install drainage pipes and other drainage system components, especially not using a computer system that is part of the consolidated system.
Hence, there is a need for more robust and scalable solutions for designing and/or implementing a drainage system, particularly for designing and/or implementing a drainage system for an agricultural area, based at least in part on three-dimensional soil modeling.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds