About TerraTactics
Soil, understood
Why we built it
Most soil knowledge lives in someone's head
Growers carry an enormous amount of knowledge about their own country — which corner holds moisture, where the pH shifts, which paddock has never quite performed. Very little of it gets written down in a form that can be compared next season. TerraTactics exists to make that easy: a probe that gives you seven indicators in the paddock, an app that saves each reading with its date and location, and a record that gets more useful the longer you keep it. Nothing about it asks you to change how you farm.
See a real farm record
How TerraTactics came to be
It started in a chaser bin during harvest
In 2020, while working as a chaser bin driver through wheat harvest, founder David M Gilbert was talking with a property owner who knew his background in technology. The conversation turned to cropping — and to the need for fast, reliable soil sampling that did not slow the season down. That is when the work began: researching and building tools that make collecting soil information easier, then logging it so a farmer can see context through a season and across many seasons — not a one-off number that disappears into a notebook.
Meet the founder
The system
Probe, app and portal — written in Australia
TerraTactics is one soil stack in four parts. TerraProbe records moisture, conductivity and temperature in the paddock, with screened pH and nutrient indicators derived from conductivity and labelled as such. TerraTactics Field Intelligence captures each sample with time and location, including offline, and logs penetrometer compaction in PSI or kPa at the same named points. TerraPortal keeps paddock boundaries, charts, laboratory reports, compaction tests and seasonal comparison in one farm record. Every line of the product — website, TerraPortal, mobile apps and the probe workflow — is 100% written and developed in Australia. Designed here, supported here, and built for Australian paddocks.
See how the platform fits together
Founder
David M Gilbert
David is the founder and creator of TerraTactics and the TerraProbe system. Based in Gloucester, NSW, he brings more than twenty-five years across websites and e-commerce, cyber security, IoT and electronics, AI-assisted tooling, and hands-on technical work — including building and running Australian software products from scratch. That mix is deliberate: field tools only help if the record is trustworthy, the software is maintainable, and the limits of a portable reading stay honest. More on David's wider work is at davidmgilbert.com.
Visit davidmgilbert.comHow we work
Three commitments we hold ourselves to
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Say what was measured
Every observation quotes the exact values and dates behind it. You should never have to guess why something was flagged.
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Separate observation from interpretation
A number is a number. What it might mean is a separate statement, and it is labelled as such.
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Name the limits
A portable screening reading is not a laboratory analysis. Where a decision needs accredited testing or a local agronomist, we say so plainly.
Start somewhere
One paddock is enough to begin
Map a boundary, take a reading, and come back to it next season. That is the whole idea.
From the paddock
What growers say
TerraTactics gives us a consistent soil record without slowing down the day. The value showed up in the second season, when we could actually compare.
What sold me was that it tells you when it does not know. It flags something worth a lab test instead of pretending it has already answered the question.
Mapping the paddocks took an afternoon. Now every reading lands where it was taken and I am not reconstructing anything from memory.