Bruno Quanquin, agronomist and founder of Earth Platforms, hold a soil sensor Nov. 29, 2023, that is helpful for agricultural fields as well as a soccer or football field at the 50th annual Hermiston Farm Fair at the Eastern Oregon Trade and Event Center in Hermiston.

HERMISTON — While some people can’t wait to retire, Bruno Quanquin chose to start a new business to avoid it.

At 64, Quanquin is the founder of Earth Platforms, an irrigation consulting company based at his home in McMinnville, but working with farmers in Eastern Oregon and all over the Pacific Northwest. He started Earth Platforms earlier this year after working as a product manager for Rain Bird, a company offering irrigation services, for years.

Farmers can hire Quanquin as a consultant during the growing season, he said, to monitor soil conditions and collect and analyze data about the soil to help determine irrigation needs.

“It’s not complicated if you’ve done it enough, but it takes time to do it,” he said. “And I don’t think farmers were born to look at spreadsheets all the time. So I can help them to make it easier.”

Quanquin, in an effort to introduce himself and his products to the agricultural community, had a booth at the 2023 Hermiston Farm Fair, which took place Wednesday and Thursday, Nov. 29 and 30.

Bitten by the travel bugQuanquin was born and raised in France, where he grew up gardening, learning the basic concept and importance of irrigation. He received a degree in agronomy from a school there before working for a Danish farm equipment manufacturing company focused on spraying applications.

He always had a travel bug, Quanquin said. He traveled for work to places such as Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, Australia and New Zealand, and he has visited 49 of the 50 states, he said. The only one he’s still missing is Alabama.

“Actually, I bore people because my wife and my kids, we look at the TV or I meet people and say, ‘Oh yeah, I know this place,’” Quanquin said, laughing at himself. “They find that so annoying, especially a Frenchman who knows the state or the country (so well).”

After years of being based in Denmark but traveling all over for work, he decided he wanted to move to North America, and he wound up living in Canada and many states before moving to Oregon in February 2020.

“That’s where I’m staying now,” he said. “I’m not moving anymore.”

And while he is now living in McMinnville, he said he is making frequent trips east to connect with farmers and support their irrigation needs, in addition to attending trade shows and events in California and around the Pacific Northwest, like the Hermiston Farm Fair.

Although he is still traveling a lot, he said, he is finding that working for himself is less stressful than working for a corporation.

“I sleep better, usually,” he said. “It’s not the same type of stress. It’s very different. It’s healthier, as far as I’m concerned.”

Soil moisture is like a bank accountQuanquin partners with Stevens Water, a company that combines software and equipment to allow for closer monitoring and management of water resources and soil on farms and sports fields.

One line of equipment that Quanquin sells and offers support for is called HydraGO, a series of portable soil sensors. The sensors are probes of various lengths and they determine the average moisture levels, saltiness and temperature of soil in the depth of the probes and then transfer that information to an application along with the exact coordinates of where the measurement was taken.

The HydraGO devices, one of which is 16 inches and the other is 3 inches, help determine all of this information in farming fields as well as turf for sports like golf, soccer or football. Taking measurements at different places in a field and in the same places at different times creates more data points to understand the variations in the soil over time and across an area.

It’s kind of like a bank account, Quanquin said.

The probe tells the farmer how much money is in their bank account, or how much water is in the soil, through an application that connects to the device via bluetooth.

As a plant grows, it removes water from the soil, depleting the bank account. So the probe also provides the data necessary to determine how much the soil should be watered to avoid overdrafting the account.

“There are formulas to convert the soil moisture gap, or what you need, into gallons per hour in terms of hours of irrigation,” Quanquin said, “so that you’re not over watering or under watering, to go back to a place where the plant is not stressing.”

Finding common ground

Quanquin is not unlike a plant.

He has been put in different environments and had to learn to thrive or fail in each of them.

Quanquin said he believes the key to adjusting to a new place is to “pick your battles about what to be picky about.”

There is a reason that people live in that place, he said, so in the places he has lived, he did his best to keep an open mind in order to find out why.

“We generally have a lot more similarities than we like to think,” Quanquin said. “Especially nowadays, it gets so polarizing that people already put you in boxes. That’s too bad. It’s not helping.”

Reflecting on his experiences, he lightheartedly said, “I like living in the (United) States, now that there’s more good French baguettes.”