The Season Doesn’t Wait for Information
Planting ends in May. Harvest begins in September or October. In between is a season of decisions: when to irrigate, when to apply, when to intervene on pest or disease pressure, when equipment needs attention, when grain storage conditions need adjustment.
Each decision has a window. Miss the irrigation timing by three days during a critical growth stage and yield potential is lost. Miss the early-stage disease indicator and a fungicide application that would have cost $18/acre becomes a yield loss worth 10 times that. Miss the grain bin temperature rise that signals a hot spot developing and the insurance claim is months away.
The information that would support these decisions exists in the sensors already installed on most large-scale agriculture operations. What’s often missing is the layer that turns sensor data into actionable context — the platform that connects field sensors, grain storage monitors, weather stations, and equipment telemetry into a unified operational view that tells the farm manager what needs attention today.
ArgusIQ consolidates agricultural monitoring into one operational platform — giving farm managers, agronomists, and operations teams the unified view that makes 300 days of in-season decisions faster and better-informed.
Field Monitoring: Soil, Weather, and Crop Conditions
Soil Moisture and Irrigation Decisions
Precision irrigation management depends on knowing actual soil moisture conditions at root depth across the field — not estimated conditions from ET (evapotranspiration) models alone, and not a single sensor reading that may not represent the field’s variability.
ArgusIQ IoT Hub connects to soil moisture sensor networks deployed at multiple soil depths (typically 6", 12", 24", and 36") at representative monitoring points across each field. LoRaWAN connectivity from an existing grain elevator, water tower, or pivot tower covers the field sensor network without cellular costs per sensor.
Soil moisture readings in ArgusIQ Asset Hub are organized by field and monitoring zone — each monitoring point has a digital identity record linked to its location on the field map. Baseline soil moisture ranges for each field are established from historical readings and agronomic targets.
Irrigation trigger logic: The Alarm Engine evaluates soil moisture against configured refill points. When soil moisture at root depth drops below the irrigation trigger threshold — considering the crop growth stage and the irrigation system’s application rate — an alert fires to the irrigation manager. For farms with automated pivot or drip irrigation, the alert can trigger automated irrigation start.
Irrigation verification: After an irrigation event, soil moisture recharge rate confirms that the application reached root depth. Anomalous recharge patterns — an area that isn’t wetting up as expected — indicate potential infiltration issues worth investigating.
Weather Integration
On-site weather stations provide the hyperlocal weather data that regional NOAA stations can’t — microclimatic variations in large fields, accurate ET calculation from measured weather rather than regional estimates, frost event detection at actual field locations.
ArgusIQ IoT Hub integrates on-site Davis, Campbell Scientific, and other station brands via Modbus or direct API. Weather data feeds the operational view alongside soil and crop sensor data — giving field managers the real-time conditions context for decisions about spray timing, field access, and irrigation scheduling.
Frost alert logic: when temperature at a specific field location drops to within 2°F of freezing, the Alarm Engine fires an alert to the farm manager. In a spring frost event during vulnerable growth stages, 30 minutes of warning is the difference between protecting the crop and discovering the damage at sunrise.
Grain Storage: The Post-Harvest Risk That Persists
Why Grain Storage Monitoring Matters
A farmer who successfully harvests 60,000 bushels of corn and stores it on-farm for later-season pricing has created an asset worth $180,000–$240,000 depending on the market. That asset can be damaged or destroyed by conditions that develop in storage — moisture migration, hot spots from grain respiration, insect activity.
Grain storage monitoring is well-established technology — temperature cables and aeration control systems have been available for decades. What most grain monitoring systems don’t provide is the connection between current grain conditions and the decision workflow that should follow them.
ArgusIQ Grain Storage Intelligence
ArgusIQ IoT Hub connects to grain bin monitoring systems — temperature cable arrays that measure grain temperature at multiple levels, moisture sensors, CO₂ sensors for early-stage spoilage detection, and bin-level sensors for inventory management.
Each grain bin has an Asset Hub record: bin identity, grain type and variety stored, fill date, quantity at storage, temperature monitoring point configuration, aeration fan status.
Hot spot detection and response: When grain temperature rises above the seasonal baseline — elevated grain temperature indicates grain respiration from moisture, insects, or biological activity — ArgusIQ fires an alert with the location of the temperature anomaly within the bin (which cable, which level) and generates a work order for inspection and aeration response.
Aeration scheduling: For temperature management, aeration fan operation should be timed to push ambient air (when ambient temperature and humidity are appropriate for cooling) through the grain mass. ArgusIQ Alarm Engine evaluates ambient conditions from on-site weather stations and grain temperature from bin sensors to identify the optimal aeration windows and either alert the operator or trigger automated fan control.
Inventory management: Bin-level sensors provide continuous grain inventory — important for both farm management (knowing what’s in storage) and for sale and transfer documentation.
Equipment Health: The Machinery That Makes the Operation Work
Irrigation Equipment
Center pivot irrigation systems are high-value, field-critical mechanical systems that cover hundreds or thousands of acres per unit. A pivot failure during a critical irrigation window — a hot, dry week in late July — results in yield loss that can exceed the pivot’s capital cost.
ArgusIQ IoT Hub integrates with pivot control systems from Lindsay, Valley, Reinke, and others via their available telemetry interfaces. Pivot status data — tower movement, alignment, water pressure, end gun status, current speed — flows into Asset Hub alongside soil moisture data.
Pivot health monitoring: Pressure at the pivot point vs. end gun pressure differential reveals pump performance and potential nozzle plugging. Tower motor current anomalies indicate mechanical resistance — a tire going flat, a tower that’s digging in. The pattern of these readings over time builds the pivot’s operational baseline.
CMMS PM schedules for pivots include gearbox oil changes (based on hours operated), end gun nozzle inspection, and seasonal winterization and startup. Operating hours tracked from the pivot telemetry feed the PM schedule automatically.
Grain Handling Equipment
Grain dryers, conveyors, bucket elevators, and augers represent the handling infrastructure that moves grain from field to storage. These machines operate intensively during harvest and then sit idle — and idle mechanical equipment that returns to high-intensity operation without maintenance attention creates failure risk.
ArgusIQ monitors grain handling equipment with vibration sensors (bucket elevator bearings, conveyor take-up bearings), temperature sensors (dryer grain and plenum temperatures), and operating hour accumulation. PM schedules trigger before the next harvest season begins, not during it.
Multi-Property and Multi-Entity Farm Operations
Large-scale farming operations often span multiple land parcels under different lease arrangements, multiple farm entities, and sometimes multiple families or partnerships with shared equipment but separate accounting.
ArgusIQ’s multi-tenant architecture maps to these structures: each farm entity has its own tenant account with data isolation. Shared equipment (custom harvesting operations, co-owned machinery) can be visible in multiple tenant accounts simultaneously. An agricultural consultant or agronomist can have read access to multiple client accounts from a single login.
The spatial view in Space Hub provides a multi-parcel map view — showing all monitored fields across the operation with current soil moisture, equipment status, and alert conditions in geographic context.
Ask Argus in the Field
Natural language queries against the full agricultural operational record:
“Which fields are below irrigation trigger threshold right now?”
“What was the soil moisture at Field 7 during the July 8th heat event, and how long before we irrigated?”
“Show me all grain bins with temperature readings above 75°F.”
“Which pivot has the most hours of irrigation this season?”
“What’s the daily ET rate for the past two weeks vs. what our irrigation schedule is providing?”
The answers come from ArgusIQ’s data model — not from assembling data manually from four monitoring apps.
Talk to our team about ArgusIQ for your farming operation.