WHO WE ARE

About three years ago, a group of people with long experience in agriculture and turf markets discussed how they might help the grower make better decisions regarding irrigation, fertigation, leaf wetness, etc. After much thought, they decided to start offering the service to growers starting with sensors that read field data to tell the grower where the irrigation or rain fall event water locates in the soil and how it moves through the soil. The sensors reported the data and it was recorded in a grower database on the company’s servers so each grower could call up the data and get a tabular and graphic look at what had been happening helping him to decide how to adjust the irrigation schedule to modify the results, if needed.

Mel Canterbury, of Canterbury Associates, was contracted to create a long term business plan to develop the company. Later, David Lankford was hired as Technical Services Manager. Lankford has experience in row crop farming, greenhouse production and has been a technical sales representative.

The first part of the plan was to work with some key growers and universities to verify that previous work done in Australia, Europe, and the Western U.S., was transferable to the eastern U.S. states. Climatic differences would be considered. Those research projects are a work in progress and will be reported on when complete. We also added other questions for the researchers. We are sensing the movement of water, both vertically and horizontally, and salinity. It has shown us to date that a grower can save a considerable amount of money by knowing how, or if, the fertilizer is being used.

In the meantime, we are seeing tremendous results. One grower will be saving approximately 20% on his fertilizer bill just by adjusting his practices. Which will prevent leaching of over fertilizing and using some of the fertilizer not being taken up due to lack of water movement horizontally. Our sensors recorded the events and our database helped the grower determine what was happening and adjustments were made.

This went on for some time and in November of 2005, a new company was formed, Earthtec Solutions, LLC, to focus on this needed service.

Actually, some of the products we use have been in the field in Australia and Europe for nearly ten years and others have been around for longer. However, Earthtec has harnessed the best of them and tied them together to provide solid database information to make better decisions faster to improve results.

We are focusing our efforts east of the Mississippi River for now but will expand later.
Keep an eye on us.

Making decisions is easy. Getting the right data to make decisions is harder. That’s our job. Earthtec is the Solution! Call us at 856-691-1970.