Chromatography is an essential topic in chemistry and a mainstay of a majority of analytical chemistry undergraduate modules and laboratory classes. This paper details a new undergraduate laboratory experiment based upon the on-site application of a fully portable and field deployable ion chromatograph (IC), named Aquamonitrix. The system was applied here in an experiment including the on-site analysis of soil pore-water samples by students, teaching aspects of environmental chemistry, sampling, field analysis, and chromatography. Over the period of two consecutive weekly 4-h second-year undergraduate laboratory sessions, students collected soil pore water samples from elevated soil beds within a campus greenhouse using lysimeters and a portable vacuum pump. In the first week's session, nitrate concentrations were measured immediately following collection on-site with the Aquamonitrix portable IC and reanalyzed in the second half of that session back within the laboratory using a conventional IC for comparison. In session two, the following week, students' samples, having been kept for the week under differing storage conditions, were once again analyzed, this time with laboratory IC and using a standard Griess-reagent-based spectrophotometric method. All groups of students had the opportunity to evaluate the comparative performance of each method, qualitatively and quantitatively, and the consequences of the storage conditions applied prior to the second round of sample analyses. Student learnings from this hands-on "in-field" versus "in-laboratory" exercise were supported by tutorials introducing both chromatography and spectrophotometry, and the benefits of "green" portable analyzers for environmental monitoring.