Just eight weeks after it acquired Turf Guard, the Toro Co. has been accused by Pennyslvania-based Advanced Sensor Technology (AST) of patent infringement.
Toro has countersued, accusing AST of false and misleading advertising.
Toro's lawsuit, filed Jan. 28 in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, claims that AST began misleading ads designed to disrupt Toro's launch of a new Turf Guard wireless lawn-monitoring system.
The ads, which claimed that AST was the sole company legally able to sell the technology, ran just before last week's U.S. Golf Industry Show, where Toro was introducing its competing Turf Guard product. The timing was intended to be harmful, the lawsuit maintains.
"We respect the valid intellectual property rights of others. And we expect others to respect our rights," said Toro spokesman Branden Happel.
Happel said that before Toro acquired Turf Guard, the Bloomington-based manufacturer conducted a thorough review of the "patent and intellectual property landscape" relating to wireless soil monitoring systems. That review included AST's claims regarding the technology, as well as patents owned by other companies, Happel said.
Toro bought Turf Guard Dec. 6. Turf Guard's soil-monitoring systems measure soil moisture, salinity and temperature through buried wireless sensors.
Toro executives said that Turf Guard's revenues were not yet significant but that the technology is important to Toro's irrigation and growth strategy.
