Agronomic Innovations of Brighton, Illinois has acquired Arkansas-based AgRobotics and their patented AutoProbe precision soil sampler.
“Everything begins with the soil,” says Agronomics Innovations c-owner Allen Lash. “Pinpoint sample integrity is what the AutoProbe offers. ‘Big Data’ is only as good as the initial measurement integrity. Spot sampling isn’t precision. You only understand what’s happening in that spot where the sample’s pulled. It’s logical that more samples are better. It’s also statistically more accurate.” The AutoProbe pulls consistent 6 inch cores as intensively as every 8.5 feet in either grid or zone management systems.
“Farmers get it,” says AgRobotics founder and AutoProbe inventor Jim Burton. A former Arkansas row crop and commercial vegetable farmer himself, Burton knows first-hand – from many backbreaking hours pulling soil samples – the value of automating the process. “Eliminating the manual labor and automating the sample method to provide many more cores to make up a sample increases the data integrity immensely. The goal is to eliminate ‘Garbage in. Garbage out!’”