Sustainable agricultural practices are intended to protect the environment, maintain and improve soil fertility while increasing production for food, feed, fuel and fiber needs.  Soil sensors play a key role in managing field heterogeneity, resource expenditure, and crop selection.  For industrial-scale agriculture, deployment of conventional, typically bi-metallic, sensors have major drawbacks.  At the end of their lifecycle, these sensors contribute to electronic waste (e-waste).  Left in the soil, sensors can leach hazardous components such as metals and microplastics.  To mitigate soil contamination, these sensors have to be manually retrieved for appropriate disposal, which can be costly in time and resources.  
Biodegradable sensors would negate the need for retrieval at the end of their lifecycle, but current state of the art biodegradable sensors have poor precision, short range for data collection and may not decompose readily.  
In the field of precision and sustainable agriculture, there is a need for employing readily biodegradable and precise temperature soil sensors that enables large-scale data collection, which would help farmers improve their production efficiency, productivity, and profitability.