Soil moisture monitoring takes the guesswork out of irrigation and crop management. Measure the actual water at multiple depths, schedule irrigation precisely, and build a long-term picture of how water moves through your soil profile.
Different crops and different decisions need different sensors, so we offer options rather than one probe for everything.
Soil probes are also used at research trial sites to compare water use and infiltration between treatments, and in regional soil moisture networks. See our projects.
A probe reads the soil it's touching. A hole that's slightly too wide, a smeared wall in clay, or an air gap at one depth will read dry all season no matter what the sky does — and nobody can tell from the graph that the install was the problem. That's why these go in properly, with the right gear, rather than being posted out to be dropped in a post hole.
Permanent sites are installed with machinery access in mind: where the boom will swing, where the harvester turns, what happens at seeding. A site that gets clipped once tends to get clipped again.
One season tells you how your soil fills and empties. Several tell you what's normal for that paddock — how deep the break really got, what the profile looked like the year the crop finished well, how much water was left at grain fill. The data compounds, which is why history is carried across hardware upgrades rather than started again.
The same probes go into research trial sites to compare water use and infiltration between treatments, and into regional soil moisture networks where the readings are shared publicly. See projects.
Direct from us in South Australia and Victoria, or through a distributor. Ask about funding — soil moisture sites have been covered by rebate rounds before.
This is a quick overview. Specs, photos, how it works and real-world examples are on the Soil Moisture Monitoring page of the BushLinx® website.