Healthy sod is high-tech firm's turf

When the words water and crisis are used in the sporting world, it could be that a tee shot is heading for a pond.

Then there's Walter Norley's idea of a water crisis.

That would be when soccer hunk David Beckham skins his flawless face on turf that is too dried out. Or if next month's 42d Walker Cup Match at Merion Golf Club were to be scrapped because some disease ate the greens.

In short, when the right amount of soil moisture is not achieved on playing surfaces, sports tragedy can ensue.

Enter Norley, an entrepreneur with a college quarterback's appreciation for sports (because he used to be one) and a sensitivity to environmental stewardship. That combination has yielded UgMO, a private company in King of Prussia that has boomed - in sales and in raising investment money - while others have drowned in this dismal economy.

For years, assessing the health of athletic turf has been a rather primitive exercise, largely amounting to taking a pinch of soil between one's fingertips to feel if it is too wet or too dry. UgMO, a subsidiary of Advanced Sensor Technology Inc., has elevated the process into a state-of-the-art world of wireless underground monitoring, Google maps, and computers.

By year's end, a version of UgMO - short for "underground monitoring" - will roll out for residential use, to help stem what Norley thinks is appalling waste contributing to the country's water-shortage problems: lawn sprinklers obliviously spouting during rainstorms.

"Saving water is serious," Norley, a Villanova resident, said during an interview last week at one of the earliest commercial adopters of UgMO - Merion Golf Club.

But there, the priority is not saving water.

"We are about playability first," said Matthew Shaffer, director of golf course operations.

Next month, he hopes to offer solid and fast putting conditions to the best amateur players from the United States, Britain, and Ireland, who will be competing at Merion for the Walker Cup.

"If Mother Nature cooperates, hopefully it will be really firm and, with a little luck, brown," Shaffer said.

But not too brown, as in sick or burnt.

That is where he is relying on UgMO, whose wireless subsurface sensors (about the size and shape of a car's oil filter) communicate soil conditions to an aboveground radio with a one-mile range. A staff of agronomists consults with customers on turf evaluations, soil and water analyses, irrigation, nutritional inputs, and maintenance.

It was a tough sell to Shaffer, an agronomist who has been overseeing golf course maintenance for 40 years.

"I'm not a techy guy," he said. "I'm a field guy."

Time has changed that a bit. As Shaffer sat in his office at Merion, he marveled at a computer screen revealing his course's soil health (temperature, moisture, and salinity levels), much as a CAT scan would reveal otherwise undetectable medical problems.

Before UgMO, Shaffer said, decisions such as whether to punch holes in the greens to release water to cool them were far from precise - and often made too late.

"This takes all the subjectiveness out of it," he said.

On the parched West Coast, the appropriately named Kyle Waters is vice president of operations at 125-acre Home Depot Center, home turf to Beckham's Los Angeles Galaxy.

With just 11 inches of rain falling there a year - the Philadelphia region recorded about four inches in little more than an hour earlier this month - the sports complex relies on recycled water. That brings a host of problems stemming from salt and chemical buildups that must be closely monitored.

Waters recently turned to UgMO for guidance with that, which in turn eases his stress about "budget constraints and trying to keep the fields in top condition."

Though UgMO has been in testing since 2005, its official launch was just in February. Since then, the company has amassed $6 million to $8 million in booked revenue, with 1,250 sensors installed at close to 50 properties.

Norley attributes its success, in part, to timing. Water has become an increasingly endangered and expensive commodity, especially in the West and Southwest.

UgMO is not the only company in the soil-monitoring-hardware business, but Norley said it was the only one selling data and interpreting it.

His focus now is introducing the company's residential product in the next couple of months - and by year's end, offering one to serve the agriculture world, from vineyard operators to almond growers.

Norley, a former University of Georgia quarterback, travels around the country promoting UgMO and pulling together an additional $15 million from angel and clean-technology investors to finance research, development, and marketing. So he has had little time for the game that has launched his product.

"I have played one round of golf this year," he said, "and played very poorly."