Soil sensor maker Sensoterra will use the Senet low-power wide area network to connect its soil probes to the internet in order to help farmers collect information that can lead to smarter decisions about water use. The Dutch company announced its partnership with Senet at this week’s 2017 InfoAg Conference in St. Louis.
“By operating our solution on Senet’s IoT network, we are able to achieve our cost and performance thresholds, which could not be achieved with other network technologies,” said Jurriaan Ruys, CEO of Sensoterra.
The Sensoterra system consists of probes, solar-powered gateways and cloud-based proprietary software. The probes come in various lengths and according to Sensoterra they can be expected to last up to 10 years. Users can monitor soil conditions from a smartphone, tablet or laptop, and an open application programming interface is available for data integration. Users receive automated notifications if the condition of a plant or tree is below a certain threshold.
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“Farmers can gain real-time insight into the soil moisture condition of their crops to maximize crop performance, yields and profits,” said Senet CEO Bruce Chatterley. “The Senet network delivers the right coverage, performance, device battery life and cost to deliver on Sensoterra’s value proposition.”
Senet is building a LoRa network that it says will be North America’s first public low-power wide area IoT network. The company faces competition from wireless carriers offering low-power wide area connectivity on their LTE networks, and also from Sigfox, Comcast, and Ingenu, all of which are building low-power wide area networks that operate in unlicensed spectrum. Ingenu recently announced a change in direction, in the wake of CEO John Horn’s unexpected departure.