Running an apple orchard alongside a full-time office job
Michael Telling runs a small organic apple orchard in southern Jutland alongside a full-time office career — and travels often. SoilSense made the distance disappear.
Southern Jutland, Denmark
- Trees
- 2,000 apple trees
- Area
- 1.5 hectares
- Planted
- 2022
Learning to read an orchard you can't always stand in.
Michael planted Sommerstedet in 2022 as a serious side venture alongside a full-time office career. The orchard supplies the hotel industry and a small set of retail outlets with single-varietal apple juice — a focused product that depends on consistent fruit quality across two thousand trees.
For someone new to agriculture, the hardest part isn't deciding to irrigate. It's reading the trees to know when. Visible signs of water stress in apple trees usually arrive too late for the fruit. Michael's pre-SoilSense routine was hands-in-soil: checking roots, digging to gauge moisture. Time-consuming when he was on site. Impossible while abroad.
SoilSense replaced that routine with a continuous moisture readout per zone and threshold-based alerts on his phone. Rainfall data is overlaid on the moisture trend, so a decision to skip or run an irrigation cycle is made against what the soil actually retained — not against the calendar.
“Now, even while abroad, I can manage everything from my phone. My life has become so much easier.”
When the trip and the orchard share a dashboard.
Seeing rainfall and soil moisture together lets Michael decide — with confidence — *not* to irrigate when a forecast or a recent rain has done the work for him. The trees stay closer to optimal moisture without the false precision of a fixed schedule. And the operation is now manageable from outside Denmark, which matters when the day job keeps you elsewhere.
Running an orchard alongside a full-time job?
Book a free 30-minute call. We'll size the system to your crop, soil, and time budget — small enough to set up yourself, robust enough to keep your trees on track while you're elsewhere.