About BSG
Townsend, Montana. 2026.
Broadwater Systems Group is not a venture-funded startup. It's a one-person company in Townsend, Montana, built by an IT systems engineer who has spent twenty-five years working with the kinds of systems BSG monitors. The platform was started to solve a real operational problem at the local school district. It exists today because the problem turned out to be common across rural ag, water, and infrastructure operations.
Beginnings
Joe Gill started in computer systems in the late 1990s, earning an Associate of Applied Science in Computer Information Systems from the Community College of Baltimore County. He spent his early career across multiple industries — supporting medical practices, retail hardware-store operations, and other small businesses — learning what production IT systems actually need to be reliable, secure, and maintainable for the people who depend on them every day.
Five years in private-sector IT taught him something important: the difference between a system that works in a demo and a system that works at 11 PM on a Saturday when something has gone wrong. That distinction would shape every system he built afterward.
The Land
In the late 2000s, Joe took a deliberate detour from IT. He enrolled at the University of Montana, completing a Bachelor of Applied Science in Forest Management in 2010. The forestry degree wasn't a career change so much as a deepening — Joe had grown up around land and rural operations, and formal training in forest systems gave him the conceptual framework for thinking about ecosystems, sustainability, and remote sensing.
He didn't stay in forestry as a profession, but the love of agriculture took root there. Remote sensing, in particular, planted a seed: the idea that you could measure conditions in places that were hard to reach, and turn those measurements into better decisions. Years later, that idea would become the core of BSG's platform.
The Workshop
Between forestry and his return to IT, Joe ran a brewing supply business. Brewing is, in many ways, an applied controls problem — temperature, pH, fermentation conditions, sanitization protocols. Joe spent years working alongside operators who depended on environmental controls to make a product, and learned the difference between consumer-grade temperature sensors and the industrial-grade equipment that actually held up in real production environments.
He also started building his own controls systems. A passive solar hot-water pre-heater at his house. Hydroponic environmental controls. Custom alerting and automation logic for projects that off-the-shelf products couldn't handle. By the time Joe returned to IT, he wasn't just an IT systems engineer — he was someone who had spent years with the practical realities of industrial sensors, environmental conditions, and the controls that hold operations together.
Townsend
Joe joined the Townsend School District as IT support more than a decade ago. School district IT is a particularly demanding kind of work — you're supporting hundreds of users across multiple buildings, with tight budgets, strict security requirements, and zero tolerance for systems being down during the school day. Every problem has to be solved with what's available, often by one person, often without warning.
Over a decade-plus at the district, Joe built deep operational discipline. He earned his CompTIA A+ certification, supported every kind of infrastructure problem rural school districts face, and developed an instinct for what "production-ready" actually means. He also developed a working knowledge of how institutions actually adopt new technology — what passes security review, what gets approved by superintendents, what teachers actually use.
That knowledge would matter when he started BSG.
The Problem
The Townsend School District operates a greenhouse for the agricultural education program. The greenhouse program needed reliable temperature and humidity monitoring — heating systems failing overnight could destroy thousands of dollars in starter plants, and a freeze during shoulder season could ruin a propagation cycle.
Joe looked at what was on the market. Consumer-grade WiFi temperature sensors didn't meet institutional security requirements — they ran on open protocols that put the school's network infrastructure at risk. Industrial-grade SCADA systems started at tens of thousands of dollars and required dedicated infrastructure the district didn't have. The middle ground — industrial-grade, secure, affordable, deployable on existing infrastructure — didn't exist as a product.
So Joe built it. The platform that became BSG started as a private LoRaWAN sensor network for the school greenhouse, with industrial-grade sensors operating completely independent of the district's wired network. As the platform took shape, Joe realized the same architecture that solved the greenhouse problem applied directly to rural ag operations, water systems, and other infrastructure across central Montana — wherever operators needed reliable monitoring without the cost or complexity of full SCADA modernization.
Now
BSG operates from Townsend, Montana, on a private LoRaWAN network architecture designed for the realities of rural infrastructure: long ranges, harsh weather, limited cellular coverage, and budgets that don't accommodate enterprise SCADA. The platform serves agriculture, water and wastewater systems, irrigation districts, industrial sites, and educational institutions — anywhere reliable monitoring matters and conventional cellular telemetry doesn't reach.
BSG is the synthesis of twenty-five years of systems work — built by someone who has actually run the systems his platform monitors, who understands what operators need because he has been the operator, and who is committed to local accountability for the people and operations BSG serves.
BSG site visits are no-pressure conversations. We come out, walk your operation, listen to where the operational pain is, and tell you honestly whether monitoring would help — and what it would cost.
Industries
Tank levels, lift stations, pressure, flow — with the compliance audit trail regulators require.
Learn moreDefensible documentation for water rights, equity, and board reporting.
Learn morePivot motor health, end-gun status, field weather, grain bins.
Learn moreCalving barns, water troughs, gates, summer range.
Learn more