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. 

Why Meadow Club in California uses soil sensors? Read the superintendent's list of 10 benefits.

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.
  • Check out more great reasons to choose Soil Scout!

Case Study

Having in ground sensors from Soil Scout helps us become more efficient and tells when and where we need the water most at critical times.

Kevin Hauschel

Superintendent, Meadow Club

Read more about the Meadow Club case!