Soil Core Sampling Vs Continuous Monitoring
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Soil core sampling is the most widely used and reliable form of soil testing, but is it the most accurate for all types of measurements? Pulling soil out of the ground, after all, can disturb the very environment farmers are trying to measure. Bruce Moeller, CEO of AquaSpy, says in-ground monitoring offers a clearer view of what’s really happening below the surface.
Moeller… “By the way, when you drop a core sample, you've disturbed that entire environment. When you're trying to measure the NO3, the nitrates in my soil, do I have 18 or 22 or 6 or 59 parts per million? When you do a core sample and you've drawn down a foot or two feet down, you've disturbed all of that. You've mixed it all together, and those ions are mobile. They're moving all over the place, so you're gonna get a rough approximation of what's down there at the time, but you've disturbed that time. If you could take a slice of air that included the pollutants and the nitrogen and the oxygen and dog hairs or whatever else you might be breathing in, if you could take that sample–okay, that'd be that sample at that place, at that point in time. But you've disturbed it, and you take it back to the lab, you can't extrapolate that to say that's what our environment is, that we're breathing it. It was just that particular slice of that environment at that particular time. Underground, you only can do it by a core sample and then look at it in the lab, or you have to have sensors down there in situ that stay.”
Moller said continuous monitoring can offer better accuracy for a variety of soil measurements.
