Visible and near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (VNIR) is becoming an extensively researched technology to predict soil properties such as soil organic carbon, inorganic carbon, total nitrogen, moisture  for precision agriculture. Due to its rapid, non-destructive nature and ability to infer multiple soil properties simultaneously, engineers have been trying to develop proximal sensors based on the VNIR technology to enable horizontal soil sensing and mapping. Since the vertical variation of soil properties are equally important as the lateral variation for precision agriculture decisions, VNIR can be utilized to develop sensors for vertical soil sensing as well. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of two VNIR probe designs using an independent soil VNIR library for model calibration. We developed and tested two designs (referred to as D1 and D2) One hundred and fifty Nebraska soil samples were randomly selected from the USDA-NRCS-KSSL soil archive and scanned by the two VNIR probes. Same soil samples were also scanned by ASD’s mug lamp accessory as the standard laboratory scans. The spectra obtained from the VNIR probes were compared with standard mug lamp scans. A soil library of 1595 sample scans was used to calibrate models using partial least squares regression (PLS) for total carbon (TC), organic carbon (OC) and total nitrogen (TN). The models were used to predict for the scans obtained from D1 and D2 and the mug lamp to evaluate the performance of the designs. Results showed that, in general, both D1 and D2 followed the mug lamp scans with D1 having higher noise levels at the beginning and end of the spectrum as compared to D2. The comparison of predictions suggested that D2 performs comparably to the standard mug lamp; whereas D1 fails to achieve such accuracy due to its inherent noises in scans. Overall performance of D2 suggested its ability to be integrated into a hydraulic penetrometer for high resolution vertical soil sensing.