FarmLab, the Australian agtech company best known for its digital soil-measurement tools, is branching into hardware with the acquisition of fellow Australian firm Ziltek, maker of the portable RemScan soil scanner.
The deal, whose financial terms remain undisclosed, adds a new dimension to FarmLab’s platform, which until now has relied heavily on software solutions like satellite imagery and mobile apps for remote soil monitoring.
FarmLab cofounder and CEO Sam Duncan said the move will help bridge a critical gap. “By bringing RemScan into FarmLab, we’re filling a critical gap in our offering and dramatically reducing the cost of environmental testing, without compromising accuracy or usability,” he told AgFunderNews.
FarmLab’s customers—mainly farmers and regenerative agriculture projects in Australia and the US—currently combine remote monitoring with costly in-field sampling to comply with carbon-credit protocols, including Verra’s VM0042 and Australia’s Soil Carbon method.
With RemScan, users can perform 20-second scans that measure soil carbon, pH, cation exchange capacity, and other key indicators, replacing multiple lab tests in the process.
This hybrid model, Duncan says, could slash soil carbon measurement costs by up to 50 percent while allowing more frequent sampling.
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“Most soil carbon projects currently rely on sparse sampling every few years,” Duncan explained. “With RemScan, we can build a time series of measurements and pair these with our AI spatial mapping tools to give producers and project developers better insights into soil carbon flux and the impact of management practices.”
The technology’s appeal reaches far beyond agriculture. Ziltek’s RemScan is already in use by oil and gas companies for land remediation projects, and even by scientific teams in Antarctica working to monitor their environmental footprint.
