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This work presents an on-chip silicon bulk-micromachined Soil Moisture Sensor (SMS) suited for irrigation control and management applications. The same basic fabrication concepts and materials, which made microelectronics successful, are now being adapted to making low-cost, small, high-performance sensor systems with integrated electronics on the same chip. As a result, this system-on-a-chip includes the SMS, readout electronics, self-test, calibration facilities and a digital bus interface for external data transmission. Moreover, since this sensor has low-cost, it could be employed several sensors networked together with the 1-wire bus, to achieve an accurate measure of the soil moisture at the plant root level. A heat-pulse technique is used (for measuring the maximum temperature on a distant point) to determine the volumetric heat capacity and hence the water content of a porous media, such as soil. This method is based on the Joule effect (heater probe shank) and in Seebeck effect (thermopile temperature probe shank). The heater and the thermopile are suspended on a dielectric window to reduce undesired heat conduction to the substrate (silicon is a good heat conductor). Thermal simulations of the bulk-micromachined SMS are performed to test sensor performance. In order to validate the method, simulations are made and experimental results were achieved with a macrosensor based on this technique. The results were compared with the measurements performed by the conventional thermo-gravimetric method.