Know what's happening
below the surface

Watch the deeper sensors respond after a set. A long irrigation can wet the surface without water ever reaching depth — and surface conditions alone won't tell you which happened. Because multi-level probes report each depth continuously, you can see water move down through the profile after an event and confirm it arrived where the roots actually are.

This matters most during post-harvest recovery, when water is often already drawn down for the season but trees still need heavy irrigation to rebuild reserves for the following year. Deep soil moisture data shows whether those long sets are reaching the root zone instead of leaving it to guesswork.

Check the probe's placement before you change your irrigation. A probe sitting in the active root zone but outside the emitter's wetting pattern produces exactly this signature — moisture registering near the surface, around the 8-inch mark, getting progressively drier with depth — even when irrigation is adequate. It reads like a penetration problem when it's really a placement problem.

The color-coded Soil Moisture Profiler makes the difference obvious at a glance. We've seen a probe pulled and reinstalled into the wetting pattern show good moisture penetration through the full profile immediately afterward — same sensor, same irrigation practice, only the placement changed.

If placement is already correct and the deeper readings still aren't responding after a set, then the irrigation genuinely isn't reaching depth and set duration is worth looking at.

Watch: Sensor Placement Best Practices →

Moisture, temperature, and salinity (EC) — which of the three you get depends on the probe. Temperature is tracked at every probe depth, because it drives root activity and nutrient uptake just as much as moisture does, so you can see how heat moves through the soil profile over time rather than only at the surface.

Salinity requires a probe that measures EC, such as the METER Group TEROS 12 or the Sentek Drill & Drop TriSCAN.

Either — it's your choice. You can run soil moisture purely as monitoring and irrigate on your own judgment, or feed it into an irrigation program so watering responds to what the root zone is actually reporting.

Used that way, live conditions can hold back, shorten, or skip a scheduled set — so a block that's still wet doesn't get watered just because it's on the calendar. Programs also confirm the valve actually operated, and use flow and pressure readings to verify water was delivered rather than assuming it. You can override anything in real time from a browser or the mobile app.

See how myRanch handles irrigation programs →