Wireless Soil Moisture Sensor For Golf Courses
As a golf course maintenance professional, your priority is to provide golfers durable and high-performing greens and fairways with smooth and uniform playability. At the same time, you must keep the maintenance costs at bay, optimize irrigation and fertilizers, and consume water sustainably. In fact, water and irrigation are substantial operational costs for golf courses. The world’s 40,000 golf courses use 9.5 billion liters (4.5 billion gallons) water daily.
But how can you maximize turf quality while reducing costs and meeting sustainability requirements?
Golf Course Maintenance Challenges
It's almost impossible to maintain turf in a perfect shape if you don't have accurate soil data. How to get accurate information about the soil conditions at the root-zone where the growth happens? How long does the soil retain water in various fairways and greens? And how to collect this data efficiently across the entire course?
Collecting soil moisture data with a hand-held instrument doesn’t provide consistent results, and covering all fairways and greens manually takes a long time. Evapotranspiration (ET) models, on the other hand, provide too broad information. Consequently, you cannot see the soil moisture variations between different parts of fairways and greens.
In general, above-the-ground observation methods correlate poorly with soil moisture levels at the root-zone. It is hard to adjust and schedule irrigation and other turf maintenance practices correctly. As a result, you cannot improve turf quality efficiently. Instead, water is wasted, and repetitive maintenance activities increase your costs.
The Game Changer – Soil Sensors!
Tap into the underground soil data to optimize your turf maintenance! You can place wireless soil sensors into the ground, at the root-zone, in the fairways and greens to continuously monitor soil moisture, salinity, and temperature below the turf.
The sensors transmit this data to the Soil Scout server. A web dashboard allows you to check the current soil moisture status in any fairway or green and so that you can make informed decisions regarding irrigation and other maintenance activities.
You can also track long-term trends, compare different areas, and optimize all your turf maintenance activities proactively based on accurate data.
Benefits of Soil Monitoring in Golf Courses
Underground soil monitoring provides accurate and actionable information about soil conditions at the root-zone, where grass growth happens. With this data available in real-time, you can carry out high-precision, timely turf maintenance practices, whether it’s controlling irrigation, planning inputs, etc.
The data-driven golf course maintenance saves you operational costs, reduces water consumption, improves turf quality, and maintains optimal playing conditions!.
Why Choose Soil Scout
- Soil Scout wireless soil monitoring sensors are the easiest and quickest to install in fairways and greens. Just drill one hole with a cup-cutter.
- The fully-buried sensors do not disturb golfers or maintenance work. They run up to 20 years below the turf maintenance-free. It simply is the most cost-efficient solution.
- You can place Soil Scout sensors wherever you want to monitor your course – regardless of whether there is a cellular signal or not. You can freely position the solar-powered, wireless repeaters to maximize wireless coverage on your club property.
- The sensors continuously measure soil moisture, salinity, and temperature and upload the data to the cloud in real-time. So, you can check the current soil conditions on the dashboard whenever needed.
- With Soil Scout, you can start monitoring just one hole and expand later by adding more sensors. No need to bother about SIM cards or data subscriptions.
Wireless Soil Moisture Sensor For Sports Fields
As a sports turf professional, your goal is to help players and athletes achieve their peak performance and meet their goals when on your turf! And this often means maintaining a safe and durable field with uniform quality and playability. But sports fields are under increasing utilization pressure. The maintenance staff is expected to keep optimal conditions year-round regardless of turf stress and damage. How do you maintain the turf in tip-top shape throughout the season while reducing maintenance costs and optimizing water consumption?
Sports Turf Maintenance Challenges
The primary challenge for sports turf professionals is the lack of accurate information about root zone growth conditions, which would also provide an insight into the soil quality variations between different parts of the turf.
The turf maintenance staff often use hand-held measurement instruments to collect soil data. However, manually collected data is not consistent in the long-term. You need to collect enough samples to compensate for this inconsistency, not to mention covering an entire field properly is time-consuming.
Due to inadequate soil data, many turf managers do not have up-to-date knowledge about the underground moisture and salinity levels and the temperature needed to support grass maintenance activities. Evapotranspiration (ET) models, on the other hand, only provide broad information, which corresponds poorly with root zone moisture and doesn't provide enough granularity for you to identify the variations in soil quality between different parts of the field.As a result, optimal turf conditions cannot be achieved, water is wasted, and repetitive maintenance activities increase your costs.
The Solution – Soil Monitoring!
With underground soil monitoring, you don't have to settle for inconsistent manual samples or a single average moisture value for the entire field. Instead, you can place multiple underground sensors across your field in the locations you know are different by experience. Distributed sensors allow you to monitor soil moisture, salinity, and temperature in different parts of the field and apply an individual turf maintenance plan for each area.
By identifying the soil quality variations in your field, you can apply the right site-specific maintenance activities and eliminate turf quality variations.
Benefits of Wireless Soil Sensors
You can improve the turf quality and, at the same time, minimize quality variations across the field. The accurate and timely soil data allows you to optimize grass growth, adjust the field hardness to minimize injuries, avoid leaching of fertilizers, and use fewer water additives and surfactants.
Because you always know the exact soil moisture level, you can reduce water consumption safely. The maintenance work efficiency increases, which allows you to move from reactive maintenance to proactive turf development instead!
Why Choose Soil Scout
- Soil Scout sensors are the easiest and quickest to install in any sports and football field – just drill one hole with a cup-cutter! You can start with a small number of sensors and add more whenever needed (no new SIM cards or data subscriptions required).
- Soil Scout continuously measures three valuable data points – soil moisture, salinity, and temperature – and presents the data on a visual Dashboard using a smartphone or laptop in real-time.
- Soil Scout sensors run up to 20 years underground without any maintenance. The sensors are fully buried, allowing for obstacle-free turf maintenance and use.
- The cost-efficient system allows you to cover an entire field, collect data from multiple spots, and capture the infield variations in soil moisture, salinity, and temperature accurately.
Wireless Soil Moisture Sensor For Agriculture
Put Your Fields Online
Traditional farming has successfully treated each field differently according to experience and scientific advice, but the next leap demands something more. In the process of learning how to treat in-field zones individually, the constantly evolving Smart Farming requires real-time data and recorded feedback on every action. Soil Scout expands that revolution to the underground.
"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” - Peter Drucker
It's well-known that root zone water availability is the most crucial factor in all plant production. However, monitoring underground conditions across a field has been so hard and impractical that until now, Precision Agriculture has focused on the easy part: aboveground data such as weather observations, optical sensing, and telemetry.
Now, we can finally let you take soil under control.
Why Should I Monitor Soil?
Perhaps you have never actually measured soil temperature or moisture. After all, it's a lot of work, and in the end "it is what it is", right? Turning the tables, there is no field work or plant development which wouldn't depend on and influence soil conditions. So the question is rather:
How would your farming change, if you knew your soil conditions exactly at all times, without even going out?
The Soil Scout Monitoring Solution, with its groundbreaking underground radio technology, is a true game-changer in how fields are managed. The opportunity to permanently bury wireless Soil Scout® sensors across fields, do fieldwork, and forget about the sensors makes soil monitoring simpler and more consistent than ever.
With your local real-time 3D underground weather map, your view on soil behavior will never be the same again.
Smart Farming = Targeted Soil Management
Precision Agriculture is well-known as a consept, where inputs are regulated site specifically based on above-ground observations. But as the most important growth events - water and nutrient uptake - take place in the root zone, why have all Precision Ag applications focused on what happens in the air?
Monitoring the above-ground has been ridiculously easy, compared to the underground.
In practise, usually when crop development starts showing noticeable symptoms, the cause could have been seen from the underground a while earlier. On the other hand, a dynamic soil moisture variability map reveals persistent root causes of yield variation, and helps to figure out corrective actions.
Precision Ag relying on weather and plant observations is doomed to remain reactive, while a real-time online view into the soil can genuily rise into proactive, smart farming.
Monitor the Good, Average and Poor
There is no right or wrong answer to how many sensors should be placed in one field, and where exactly. However, sensing locations with different yield potential for certain, is key to meaningful data. As a start off rule of thumb, we recommend two depths at three well chosen locations in each field to be monitored. This enables actions on the extreme values, or averaging data across these reference points.
Observing how soil behavior differs in good and poor areas, reveals problems instantly.
Water infiltration speed, moisture profiling, drainage performance etc. are absolutely crucial factors, but any numerical values on these are very hard to interpret. However, comparing such figures from good, average and poor areas is an easy and straight-forward task for anyone with common agronomic sense.
This is why monitoring soil at multiple depths in several locations produces insightful data to support tangible actions based on what you see.
A common starting point for many agricultural customers is to begin their Soil Scout experience with a set of six to nine sensors for a ten hectare field, but Soil Scout experts always work out the best configuration in collaboration with the persons with the deepest expertise - the farmers themselves.
In this example Scout locations were based on historic yield maps. While drought limited growth in the poor region beginning from July, the good yield spot was able to sustain water availability throughout the season.
Why Choose Soil Scout
- Soil Scout is the only soil sensor solution you can freely distribute across a field — Install and Forget!
- The system is preconfigured and will start operation as you switch the Base Station on. Scouts are the quickest to install, and you can plant more sensors at any time. They connect to the Base Station automatically — no additional data plans are needed.
- The small sensors run for 20 years underground without maintenance. They don't disturb fieldwork and are safe from wheel pressure and wildlife, resulting in superior cost-efficiency over the years.
- Smart sensor placement provides real-time monitoring of real differences and enables treating each area individually and optimally. Our well-trained Soil Scout staff will assist you in choosing the best locations.
- When irrigating, instant before/during/after data enables both quick reactions and long-term ability to maintain optimal soil moisture and save irrigation costs.
- The sensors operate out of sight year-to-year, providing you with a long-term view of soil behavior. As a result, you get accurate and informed soil management instead of traditions and guesswork, and build up long-time records for your future needs.
