Remote Monitoring for Farms

Monitoring for a working farm

A farm is a collection of tanks and water that all matter on different days. There’s the supply or nurse tank that has to be full before a crew rolls, the irrigation pond you’re drawing down through the season, the diesel that can’t run dry mid-field, and the liquid fertilizer you don’t want to guess at. Checking each one is a walk or a drive, and the cost of getting it wrong lands at the worst possible time — a dry tank during planting, a leak found a week late, a spray day lost to an empty nurse tank.

Water is also the farm’s biggest resource line. Agriculture accounts for roughly 80% of the nation’s consumptive water use, and irrigation is the single largest draw, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service — and every gallon costs fuel or power to move. A leak, an overflow, or a pond drawn down faster than you planned is money leaving the place quietly.

Meterra puts a wireless sensor on any of those and sends the level — plus an alarm — to your phone. You manage the whole yard and the far field by exception, on one screen, instead of eyeballing tanks on a schedule.

One sensor for water, diesel, and fertilizer

The advantage on a farm is that Meterra’s sensing is non-contact. The unit mounts above the tank and measures the distance to the surface with ultrasonic sensing, so it never touches the liquid. That’s what lets the same hardware read water, diesel, and liquid fertilizer — and it’s why there’s nothing to corrode in fertilizer, clog in dirty water, or gum up in fuel. One product, one app, every tank in the yard.

Where farms put it to work

• Supply and nurse tanks — know a tank is full before the crew needs it; get an alarm if it drains or won’t fill. See water tank monitoring.
• Irrigation ponds and reservoirs — submerged pressure level and trend on open water, reading under ice, so you can plan pumping and spot a fast drawdown.
• Diesel and liquid fertilizer tanks — track yard inventory and reorder on data, not a dipstick, and catch a slow loss early.
• Livestock water — if you run stock too, the same system covers their tanks and troughs. See livestock water monitoring.

Earns its keep at the busy times

Monitoring pays off most in the weeks the farm is flat out. At planting and harvest, an unplanned run to check a tank is time you don’t have, and a dry diesel or nurse tank can stop a crew cold. Live readings let you refill on your own schedule and keep what the field needs staged and ready; alarms catch a leak, a stuck float, or a quit pump before it costs you a day. The rest of the year it’s the quiet leak and the slow drain it flags early — water, fuel, and chemical that would otherwise just disappear.

Built for the field

There’s no power or internet to run to a reservoir or a back-forty tank, so Meterra doesn’t need any. The sensors report over Verizon NB-IoT cellular, run 3+ years on a battery (solar where you want indefinite runtime), and install in about 15 minutes with no electrician. Everything lands in one app — live level, percentage and volume, the trend over days or weeks, CSV export for records, and the alarms that actually change what you do that morning.

Funding help

Many states and federal programs cost-share on-farm water efficiency. In Utah, for example, the state’s water-funding portal (including the Agricultural Water Optimization Program) supports on-farm projects, and USDA NRCS EQIP / WaterSMART provides cost-share for irrigation and water management. Meterra’s per-point pricing makes a monitoring line easy to include — confirm eligibility with each program. See our Grants & Funding page for the full list.

Getting started

Start with the tank that would hurt most to run dry or overflow — the nurse tank, the fuel, the reservoir you’re drawing down. Tell us what you’d put a sensor on and the coverage where it sits, and we’ll map the right setup and, if you’d like, start you on a pilot.