**4. Conclusion**

Application of neutron gamma analysis for soil elemental determinations can be an alternative to traditional chemical analysis. This technology has advantages over other methods since it is a nondestructive *in-situ* method that requires no soil sampling and associated laboratory processing.

The presented PFTNA methodology can be used for determination and mapping of soil carbon content. The accuracy of soil carbon analysis by PFTNA is no worse than

*Neutron-Gamma Analysis of Soil for Digital Agriculture DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102128*

**Figure 7.** *Carbon distribution map.*

traditional chemical analysis. Acquiring more experience and refining the described technology for large-scale soil carbon content determination under diverse field environments is the future direction of this research.

The equipment and methodology described in this chapter can also be applied to measure field content of elements such as Fe, Si, Al, H (water content) and Cl (soil contamination by chlorinated compounds). In addition, this mobile system can be used for measuring and mapping natural soil radioactivity, particularly potassium-40;



#### **Table 4.**

*Results of calculating the carbon content of an Iowa field (confidence level of errors is 0.68).*

in this case, the neutron generator is turned off since only gamma detectors are required. The application of the PFTNA technology for such assessments are other future topics of investigation.
