AST uses Google, sensors to save on water, power, poisons

Matt Shaffer, director of golf operations at Merion Golf Club, doesn't have to guess how wet the grass is at the club's Championship course. Fifty buried beer can-sized sensors send data, via wireless, to a Google Earth image of the rolling links, on his office computer. GPS nodes on each green and fairway show red (dry), green (wet) or blue (normal). That lets Shaffer irrigate and spray only where needed.
  "It's given us 35 to 40 percent savings on water and pump power, and it's dramatically reduced our dependence on chemicals to cut diseases," Shaffer said.
  Merion bought the system from Advanced Sensor Technology Inc., a firm that moved from North Palm Beach to King of Prussia earlier this year after Red Badge Inc. partner Bob Burch, a serial entrepreneur and investor who backed Everlands, Eagles Eye, Jawbone, ICG and Color Kinetics, among other companies, invested $5 million earlier this year, on top of $10 million from other investors.
   "We figure there's a $6 billion market for agricultural, residential and sports irrigation," says Advanced Sensor founder Walt Norley, a former quarterback for Germantown Academy ('81) and the University of Georgia ('85) who ran a golf course soil aeration company in Florida before patenting the sensor system. The company employs 8 traveling agronomists and office people based on First Ave., including Carmen Magro, former head of the turf program at Penn State, and a team of seven engineers and developers in San Diego.
   "I'm not from the golf world. I realized golfers had zero access to realtime information," Norley told me. "The biggest decision every golf course superintendent makes is how much water to apply. Theywere donig this on touch and feel. We developed our own wire mesh system", a non-linear relay that runs even when some canisters are offline.
  "Golf superintendents, just like farmers, are busy guys," he added. "They don't really have the time and ability to make sense of a lot of data. Our job, with the software and the agronomy, is to show them the value...There's good companies that measure pollutants in the air and that monitor things in the water. We're really the first guys to measure everything in the soil."