Monitoring soil moisture in
grazing systems

In 2013, BIGG initiated a project to monitor soil moisture in local grazing systems (funded by a Caring for Our Country Community Landcare Grant). This involved the establishment of telemetry based weather monitoring stations located in three representative pasture paddocks (Flaxman Valley, Keyneton, Koonunga), which was the first time a farming systems group in S.A. has demonstrated soil moisture monitoring in pastures.

In 2019, a fourth station located in a native pasture paddock at Moculta was installed via funding from Adelaide and Mt Lofty Ranges NRM Board’s ‘Supporting Sustainable Primary Production’ grant. Additional support for the project was also received from the AMLR in 2020.

Each station comprises a sub-surface capacitance probe measuring moisture to a depth of 85cm, an automatic rain gauge and sensors measuring air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction, NDVI and solar radiation. These are connected to a solar powered telemetry unit that transmits data every 15 minutes via a mobile phone network to an internet server. Data downloaded from the server is then used to produce real-time graphs for each site.