Soiltech Wireless is making new moves with its yellow beacon. The device gained popularity with potato growers by being built with growers’ valuable input, offering real solutions to farmers’ real issues.
The beacon can essentially be treated as a potato — planted, harvested, and stored — to offer real-time data about environments.
But since it first appeared on the scene, Soiltech has made some important new improvements to a device that was already gaining favor with farmers.
Placement deep within the pile
While the device always had the capability to be stored, signal quality limited the beacon’s location to either the top or sides of the storage pile. With the latest improvements of a custom enclosure for the device and antenna, the sensor can now be buried deep within the pile.
“We can look at temperature, humidity, and CO2 from the middle of the potato pile. It helps look at storage hotspots, potential disease emergence, and helps growers get more granularity on conditions within storage because multiple sensors can be placed within the pile,” said Soiltech Wireless founder Ehsan Soltan.
Electric conductivity has also been added to the sensors, which gives an indication to the fertility of the soils. It’s not a micronutrient sensor, but does offer an view of balance.
“The antennas have allowed us to get back into regions where the signal was poor, and it allows us to do multi-depth sensing,” Soltan said.“The external antenna has been great in expanding the areas in which we can be deployed, and expanding the depths we can deploy down to.” The device can be used up to 5 feet deep.
Anyone who already has a Soiltech beacon can take their existing devices and purchase this upgrade for them. The storage box-like upgrade includes a large antenna wrapped in a conduit, which can be snaked from the bottom of a storage pile to the top to get the signal.
Soiltech has also built out a software farm management system that allows growers to capture application records, make recommendations for both inputs and irrigation, and use the custom form builder.
“A lot of systems will have a kind of default crop status tracking ability. You can make a note of certain things, but you’re restricted to the form that has been built for you. A lot of farm management software is geared towards corn and beans because that’s where the acreage is. We’re going to great lengths to include features that really speak to specialty crop growers,” Soltan said.
Soltan recognizes that specialty crop farmers get less customizability on their software, and much of the software available in the market focuses on chemical applications and prescriptions in-field, which Soiltech also offers, but the beacon also goes beyond the field.
It allows the build out of storage facilities, the creation of zones, and allows for the logging of which crops from what fields went into which zones in the potato cellar. And just like a grower would log a fungicide spray that happened in the field, so can the sprays — such as sprout inhibitors — that happen in storage.
“Every time you’re looking at the conditions, you’re looking at the conditions of the crop and the facility. Is the crop greening or sprouting? Does the plenum have any leaks?”
Sustainability emphasis
Many companies throw around the word “sustainability,” but the team at Soiltech takes it to heart. They’ve made a great effort to demonstrate how using the product helps a farm with its sustainability, such as the 4 Rs, or an agribusiness with its United Nations Sustainability Development Goals.
Soiltech also shared a regenerative program with a few local farmers, offering a discount to those who were going to use the beacon sensor in their cover crops. The program was unadvertised and launched late in the season, but was well received in the cross section of people who learned of it.
An expanded program could be in the future.
“We want to expand it not only for those planting a full cover crop, but for anybody who’s truly going to be deploying our devices into a regenerative setting,” said Soltan, “because regenerative has a lot of different flavors.”
Photos: Soiltech Wireless
Other Articles
