Farm Sensors Without the Subscription
Farm sensors are cheap to buy and expensive to keep. We are building the alternative, and looking for the people to build it with.
Entry-level soil moisture probes start at around €375 a unit — and the subscription behind them runs €89–300 per unit per year, every year, for as long as you want the data. On a farm with a dozen measurement points the running cost outlives the hardware. That is the part of the market nobody has fixed, and it is the part we are building against.
The prices above are not ours to soften: they come from a published 2026 comparison of commercial soil sensors, and they are the reason a farm that would benefit from twenty sensors buys two.
What We Are Building
A base station the farm owns, and sensors that talk to it.
The station sits on the farm, holds the thresholds, and keeps working when the internet does not. Sensors report to it over long-range radio — no SIM card in each device, no per-sensor subscription, no data held hostage in someone else’s cloud.
The first sensor is a multi-depth soil probe that reads the moisture profile down the root zone and calibrates itself to the soil it is sitting in, so it does not need a lab test or an agronomist to be useful on day one.
The soil probe is the first node, not the product. The product is the station and everything that can be added to it afterwards: weather at the field rather than interpolated from twenty miles away, tank and trough levels, store temperatures.
One station, one app, a sensor at a time as the farm needs them — and each sensor after the first has only its own cost to justify.
It Connects to What You Already Have
The station’s job is to turn a measurement into an action, and it does that the way farm equipment has always been switched: a volt-free contact. That is the same interface an irrigation controller expects from a rain sensor — a normally-closed or normally-open pair on its sensor terminals — and where a controller has no sensor port, the contact goes in line with the valve common instead. Nothing about your existing controller changes, and nothing needs replacing.
The same output drives a solenoid valve directly, or a pump through a contactor, or anything else that starts on a switch closing: a frost fan, an auger, a trough valve, a gate.
Where you want the numbers rather than the action, the station also speaks the languages the rest of the yard already uses — Modbus over RS-485 for pumps, drives and meters, and MQTT or a simple web call into whatever farm software you run. Your data leaves the farm only if you decide it should.
We Already Have the Audience This Is For
We publish twelve free calculators for UK farms — nutrient rates, NVZ loading, spray windows, stocking rates, lime, blight risk — with every figure traced to DEFRA, AHDB, HSE or the published research.
They are used. In the last 28 days the site drew 155 visits from Google searches, and one calculator alone was used by 471 people. Google’s own results place us first for the terms those farmers search.
That is something most hardware startups buy at great expense and still get wrong: a standing audience of the people who would use the sensors, and a working understanding of the decisions they are actually trying to make.
The design work is done in the open where it can be checked, and the parts that are ours stay ours. We have run the prior-art searches ourselves, and we know precisely what is patented, where, and until when.
What We Are Looking For
Investment
To take a finished design to a manufactured product — the first production run, and a season of field data standing behind it.
Manufacturing
Partners who can build electronics and the sensor body at small-series volumes, to a written acceptance-test specification.
Pilot farms
Growers willing to run a station and a set of sensors through a full season and tell us the truth about them.
We are not looking to raise on a story. What exists today is the design, the sourcing work and the audience. What money buys is the first production run and the field data behind it.
Talking to Us
If any of that is of interest, tell us which part. The commercial detail — construction, costs, terms — is discussed directly and under confidentiality, not published on a website.