AgroTech

The root zone behaves like a tank with a refill line. Capacitance probes report volumetric water content as a percentage, while tension sensors such as tensiometers or granular matrix blocks report how hard the crop has to pull to extract water, in kPa. Agronomists set two lines per soil and crop: field capacity after a full irrigation and a refill point before stress, with typical tension triggers between 20 and 60 kPa depending on soil texture. Irrigation starts when the profile crosses the refill line and stops when the wetting front reaches the deepest sensor.

Automating that logic is what an IoT platform adds. Readings from every zone land in one place, rules watch the refill point around the clock, and published field studies report water savings of roughly 20 to 38 percent compared with calendar based schedules, with yields maintained.

Reference evapotranspiration, or ETo, estimates how much water a well watered reference grass surface loses per day. It is computed with the FAO-56 Penman-Monteith equation from solar radiation, air temperature, humidity and wind speed, and multiplying it by a crop coefficient gives the daily water demand of the actual crop. That figure, combined with soil moisture feedback, is the standard way to size irrigation doses.

Vapor pressure deficit, or VPD, measures how thirsty the air itself is and drives transpiration in greenhouses and orchards, where growers typically steer the climate toward roughly 0.8 to 1.2 kPa. One on-farm weather station streaming radiation, temperature, humidity, wind and rain into the platform is enough to compute both indicators per plot and per day, instead of borrowing numbers from a station many kilometers away.

LoRaWAN was designed for exactly this situation. A private gateway placed on a barn, silo or hilltop covers a radius of 10 to 15 km in open rural terrain, and battery nodes transmitting a few readings per hour routinely last for years in the field. The farm owns the radio infrastructure, so coverage does not depend on any carrier's rollout map.

Where mobile coverage does exist, NB-IoT and LTE-M avoid installing gateways at all: each device carries a SIM and talks to the platform directly. Thinger.io ingests both paths, with LoRaWAN traffic arriving through The Things Stack or ChirpStack integrations with payload decoding, and cellular devices speaking MQTT or lightweight HTTP.

Yes, and most projects start that way. Installed fertigation controllers, pump panels and hydraulic valves usually expose pulse counters, relay inputs, 4-20 mA signals or Modbus registers. A field RTU reads and drives them locally and forwards everything over MQTT or HTTP, so the existing programmer keeps running while the platform adds remote visibility and higher level rules on top. The latching solenoid valves used by battery controllers can be driven directly from low power RTUs.

Integration also runs in the other direction. Thinger.io exposes every stored reading through a REST API, and the built-in Node-RED plugin bridges industrial protocols, so validated field data can feed a farm management system or an ERP instead of creating another data silo.

It depends on the number of plots, the sensors per zone and the integration work, so most projects are quoted individually. On the hardware side, a monitored zone typically combines a multi-depth soil probe, a shared weather station and a field node or RTU, with LoRaWAN sensors ranging from low cost nodes to research grade probes.

On the platform side, our Private Cloud plans are published on the pricing page and start at 49 euros per month for a dedicated instance, which is usually enough to run a first pilot across several plots. Enterprise and on premise deployments are sized per project.

With off the shelf hardware, weeks rather than months. A typical scope is one or two representative plots: a soil moisture profile probe per zone at two or three depths, one weather station for the farm, a flow meter at the head unit and, if actuation is in scope, latching solenoids on the pilot sectors. On the platform side, provisioning, dashboards and refill point alerts take days, so the schedule is driven by fieldwork and radio coverage checks.

A good pilot covers a full irrigation season, so sensor guided scheduling can be compared against the previous year's water use and energy bill on the same plots. That comparison, not the technology, is what justifies scaling to the whole farm.