MyBitSecure: Technology that gives soil a voice

By Sustainability Institute

Farmers across Africa wrestle with water management, crops lost to heat and drought, patchy internet connectivity, and compromised visibility into their soil health and what’s actually happening in their fields. MyBitSecure’s MBS SmartFarm Platform offers the technology to help manage these conditions and gives the soil a voice so you can hear exactly what it is saying.

MBS SmartFarm at the Sustainability Institute

Putting the MBS SmartFarm Platform into action at the Sustainability Institute’s permaculture gardens in Lynedoch, Stellenbosch has proved how useful it is in managing the unforeseen. Take for instance the water leak. It’s the middle of the night and water is moving under the beds. The sensors picked this activity up and a leak was discovered in real time that the eye would never have seen. This was the sight of the sensors that have been running since February measuring soil health, offering live data on moisture content, soil pH, electrical conductivity, and temperature. 

Sensor data showed more than 80% of irrigation events on the property in April were unnecessary because the soil was already holding enough moisture. The team was watering because that’s what Tuesday looked like, not because the plants needed it.

Once they started understanding what the readings were saying, everything changed, not just for water, but for soil health too.

Finding what you can’t see

That same visibility that identified a leak also showed how the soil chemistry shifted: salt levels dropped noticeably, helped by heavy May rain. This meant the soil released nutrients more easily and plants got what’s in the ground instead of fighting for it.

The benefit for small-scale farmers

The cost of guesswork is high when you consider that a large share of irrigation water can be wasted, along with the money spent pumping it.

The soil sensors in the MBS SmartFarm Platform show exactly when and where crops need water. Climate shocks add another layer of risk. Sudden frost, heat waves, or unexpected rain can catch a farm off-guard, and no warning often means crop loss. Weather alerts and forecasts give farmers the extra hours they need to protect their harvest before conditions turn. Many rural African farms have weak or no cell coverage in the field, which makes most smart tech useless. The platform’s long-range LoRaWAN sensors solve this by covering kilometres of farmland from a single gateway, so data still gets through even when the mobile network doesn’t.

Ukama, not just monitoring

The deployment at the SI has been a success because of the willingness to experiment, learn, ask difficult questions, and get it wrong before getting it right. As Mulweli Nethengwe, the SI’s Research and Strategy Analyst said, these tools matter “not as ends in themselves, but as enablers of agency.” A sense of interconnectivity amongst all things (Ukama) emerged and it showed that people, technology, and nature aren’t three separate things, they’re part of one system.

Technology is only useful if farmers can trust it and use it with confidence, and MBS SmartFarm tech is. Every piece of data is encrypted in transit and at rest, with tamper-evident logging and secure device authentication. It is hosted in South Africa and POPIA-compliant, so your farm data stays yours rather than sitting on a server in another country. The support doesn’t stop at security. MyBitSecure’s team handles the full on-site installation, from site assessment and sensor placement to gateway setup and power, and stays connected afterwards for ongoing maintenance. Hands-on training with live sensors in the field then teaches farmers to read soil EC, moisture, pH, temperature, and water levels on the MBS SmartFarm Platform, and to know when to act.

With El Niño bearing down on the season ahead, MBS SmartFarm is the technology to give clearer guidelines, save money and truly connect with what your soil is saying it needs.

Discover how MyBitSecure can help

Listen to the soil before it has to shout. It can tell you what it needs, you just have to be set up to hear it.