The Blue Oak Ranch Preserve north of Springville is the site for a number of future projects, including a project to study the habits of the western pond turtle. Last summer (August 2022) a team of students from Poplar installed a cellular gateway on a hill overlooking a large pond Read more…
Gateways are systems that wirelessly collect information from sensors and upload that data to the Internet for easy access. Gateways are usually installed at farms and have a wireless range of about 1 to 3 miles. But if a gateway were to be installed on top of a hill or Read more…
The western pond turtle is found along the West Coast ranging from Baja Mexico to Canada. These turtles are found at the Blue Oak Ranch Preserve located north of Springville, California and managed by the Sequoia Riverlands Trust. The goal of this project is to learn more about where the Read more…
We use different types of sensors in the farm projects. Some sensors are large and some are quite small. One particular soil sensor has a diameter of about 1 inch and we were installing it with a soil auger that digs an 8 inch hole. So we developed our own Read more…
A new requirement for land owners in California is reporting the water levels of ponds on their land. Measuring and recording pond levels on a monthly basis requires extra time, effort and fuel. Youth from the towns of Poplar and Arvin helped with the design, manufacturing, and installation of a Read more…
A team of middle school students from the town of Poplar visited a grower in Strathmore to discuss the idea of installing soil moisture sensors in the pistachios. After a conversation with the grower a new idea emerged for a future project: creating a system that measures how much water Read more…
To forecast the weather NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) gathers and analyzes data from local weather stations to understand what’s happening today. There are places where NOAA does not have access to local weather data and predicting the weather in those areas may not be as accurate as it Read more…
Each day growers make many decisions in order to grow the food that we eat. These decisions include deciding when to irrigate and for how long. Soil moisture sensors, buried next to a plant’s roots, provide growers with real-time data that help them decide when its time for an irrigation. Read more…
Watsonville High students expressed an interest in going back to their elementary schools to teach art to children. The school supported their idea.
After the pottery wheel project the principal of the middle school in Gonzales asked if we could extend the program to engage 2 STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) focused classes, about 60 youth in total. It was agreed that this could be done if the effort was led by about Read more…