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.

See Case Study: Financial Benefits of Soil Monitoring In Sports Turf Maintenance

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.
  • Check more great reasons to choose Soil Scout!

Case Study

Soil Scout monitoring solution has helped me make many extremely critical decisions on timings. Wasting fertiliser by applying at the wrong temperatures and moistures would cost me around £2,000 per application, and I was able to prevent this from happening thanks to the Soil Scout data. I have been able to use water more accurately and efficiently and apply irrigation more effectively at the right time. I have gained extra levels of knowledge in every aspect of my grasses and soils. It genuinely changed the way I looked at everything related to our pitches and grounds.

Andy Richards

Grounds Manager, Haileybury School, Hertfordshire

Read more!

Case Study

Case Study

Soil Scout monitoring solution has helped me make many extremely critical decisions on timings. Wasting fertiliser by applying at the wrong temperatures and moistures would cost me around £2,000 per application, and I was able to prevent this from happening thanks to the Soil Scout data. I have been able to use water more accurately and efficiently and apply irrigation more effectively at the right time. I have gained extra levels of knowledge in every aspect of my grasses and soils. It genuinely changed the way I looked at everything related to our pitches and grounds.

Andy Richards

Grounds Manager, Haileybury School, Hertfordshire

Read More!