A watermelon growing in the desert tells you that something worked.
A soil profile can help you understand why.
In 2020, images from a Desert Control trial in the United Arab Emirates appeared in BBC and CNN coverage around the world.
The reason was obvious.
A piece of sandy desert had been turned into a productive growing area containing watermelon, zucchini and pearl millet.
Desert Control achieved this using Liquid Natural Clay, a treatment designed to alter the properties of sandy soil so that it can retain water and nutrients more effectively.
It is an impressive visual story.
It is also a good example of why environmental technology eventually needs something less visual: reliable measurement.
The difference between an outcome and an explanation
Imagine two plots of sandy land.
Both are irrigated with the same amount of water. On one plot, that water remains within the root zone for long enough to be useful to the crop. On the other, much of it moves rapidly downward through the sand.
From above, both plots may initially look wet.
Below the surface, they are behaving very differently.
This is one reason soil measurements become particularly valuable when evaluating a technology intended to change water retention.
The crop tells us the eventual outcome.
The soil tells us part of the process that produced it.
Monitoring a 60 cm soil profile
For the Desert Control deployment, Pycno's Terra soil sensor was used in its 60 cm configuration.
Rather than treating soil as a single point measurement, this type of deployment provides a way to observe conditions through a meaningful part of the root environment.
That depth matters in highly permeable soils.
If irrigation rapidly passes through the upper layers and continues downward, the profile can reveal behaviour that would be impossible to determine simply by looking at the surface.
The Terra units used 4G connectivity, helping measurements from the field become available remotely without requiring someone to visit each monitoring point simply to retrieve data.
Why connectivity matters in environmental projects
On a small research plot, manually downloading data may be inconvenient but possible.
As deployments grow, that model becomes increasingly difficult.
Sites may be geographically distributed. Environmental conditions may be harsh. Data may need to be reviewed while an irrigation event or field operation is still relevant.
Connected sensing changes the operating model.
With the Terra 4G sensors and Deep Orbital technology forming part of the monitoring stack, measurements could become part of an ongoing digital record rather than a collection of isolated field observations.
And that changes what can be done with the data.
One trial can become part of a much larger experiment
Consider what happens when the same measurement approach is used across multiple projects.
One site has a particular soil composition. Another has a different irrigation system. A third grows another crop. Some experience more extreme temperatures or different rainfall patterns.
With comparable measurements, those differences can begin to be studied rather than simply observed.
That is particularly important for technologies like Liquid Natural Clay because, as Desert Control explained in the BBC article, soils differ and treatment needs to be adapted to local conditions.
The more deployments are measured consistently, the greater the opportunity to understand where a treatment performs best and how management should change from one environment to another.
The dashboard is not the product
There is a temptation in IoT to focus heavily on connectivity, dashboards and charts.
But the important part of an environmental monitoring system is not that a graph exists.
It is that the graph represents something physically important.
In this case, the important physical questions concern the movement and availability of water inside a treated sandy soil.
A sensor has value because it makes part of that invisible process measurable.
Deep Orbital has value because those measurements can form part of a persistent and usable information layer around the physical project.
And Desert Control's technology has value because it is attempting to change the soil process being measured in the first place.
The three roles are different, but complementary.
From IoT to evidence
CNN's coverage focused heavily on the potential scale of Desert Control's technology and what lower-cost deployment could mean for agriculture and food security in dry regions.
Scaling the physical treatment is one part of that challenge.
Scaling the evidence around it is another.
Connected soil monitoring offers a way to do both at the same time.
As more land is treated, more environments can be measured. As more environments are measured, future deployments can be informed by a stronger evidence base.
That is a much more interesting role for IoT than simply putting another sensor in a field.
It turns sensing into part of the scientific infrastructure behind the technology.
Background: Desert Control's UAE work and Liquid Natural Clay technology were covered by BBC Future and CNN in 2020. References to Pycno Terra, its 4G 60 cm configuration and Deep Orbital relate to the monitoring technology used in the Desert Control deployment.
