Today, we’re looking at Austria-based Pessl Instruments, an agtech provider operating under the METOS brand. Irrigation equipment manufacturer Lindsay Corporation recently acquired a minority interest in Pessl Instruments following a strategic partnership the 2 companies announced in May 2023.

Pessl offers IoT (internet of things) hardware and software tools, including field monitoring systems with a wide array of agronomic data points that inform Lindsay’s FieldNET remote irrigation management platform.

We sat down with Pessl Instruments CEO Gottfried Pessl to talk about how Lindsay dealers can benefit from offering Pessl’s hardware to farmers, which will be an add-on to the Lindsay FieldNET management platform.

“We are going to educate them [dealers] because that's for them another income stream of their activity. Nowadays, more and more [it] is going to be [about] recurring revenue. So they have already FieldNET, which is a very successful product. So it will be an add-on on FieldNET. So you can have additionally weather stations integrated in FieldNET. So you [farmers] pay a little bit more, but you get much more information, much more insights. The same is also with soil moisture. So the Lindsey dealer can support the hardware in the field.”

Pessl says a grower with 5,000 acres of corn on flat ground would need between 5 and 15 of Pessl Instruments’ in-field weather stations for monitoring the crop, though for measuring rainfall, a grower might need up to 100 precipitation sensors.